{"id":1600586,"date":"2022-08-11T08:48:12","date_gmt":"2022-08-11T12:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1600586"},"modified":"2022-08-11T08:49:02","modified_gmt":"2022-08-11T12:49:02","slug":"betsy-mccaughey-hospitals-need-to-defer-to-families-on-life-and-death-issues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/betsy-mccaughey-hospitals-need-to-defer-to-families-on-life-and-death-issues\/","title":{"rendered":"Betsy McCaughey: Hospitals Need to Defer to Families on Life-and-Death Issues"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">22<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fbetsy-mccaughey-hospitals-need-to-defer-to-families-on-life-and-death-issues%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1600586&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><\/div>\n<p>Hospitals need to back off their authoritarian &#8220;we know best&#8221; posture and respect what a patient&#8217;s family wants. <\/p>\n<p>At 10 a.m. Saturday, Royal London Hospital stopped life support for 12-year-old Archie Battersbee, against his parents&#8217; wishes. He was dead by 12.15 p.m. Millions had followed his case since April, when his mother found him unconscious on the floor.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, he took a dangerous dare promoted on TikTok to hold his breath until he blacked out. Archie damaged his brain and never regained consciousness. <\/p>\n<p>Watching Archie&#8217;s family battle the medical establishment raised a troubling question: Will imperious hospital personnel get to dictate when the plug is pulled on someone you love? Hospitals are cutting lives short, defying families.<\/p>\n<p>After Archie spent months on a mechanical ventilator, his parents wanted to move him to hospice, at private expense. But the hospital refused to release him, instead insisting on terminating life support.<\/p>\n<p>With the aid of the Christian Legal Centre, the parents went to court to stop what they considered an execution. They argued that Archie&#8217;s heart was still beating and tests confirming brain death had not actually been done.<\/p>\n<p>The British High Court sided with the hospital.<\/p>\n<p>Archie&#8217;s fate resembles the death of another British child, 23-month-old Alfie Evans, in 2018. Pope Francis was ready to take Alfie to a facility in Rome for brain-damaged children. An air ambulance stood by, but the hospital refused to allow the transfer and ended the toddler&#8217;s life instead.<\/p>\n<p>British courts ruled that &#8220;the hospital must be free to do what has been determined to be in Alfie&#8217;s best interests.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a phrase hospitals in the U.S. and the U.K. use often to override what parents want.<\/p>\n<p>What happened to these British families can happen here, too. On rare occasions, parents take their fight to court. <\/p>\n<p>Texas allows hospitals to impose a 10-day deadline, telling families to accede to ending life support or move the patient elsewhere. <\/p>\n<p>New Jersey is one of the most flexible states, allowing families with religious concerns to continue life support. When teenager Jahi McMath suffered a brain injury during a tonsillectomy at Children&#8217;s Hospital in Oakland, California, the hospital declared her brain dead. Jahi&#8217;s Christian parents went to court to keep her on life support and won the right to move her to New Jersey. They sold their house to support her care there.<\/p>\n<p>Since 1981, federal law has defined &#8220;death&#8221; to include irreversible cessation of brain function, even if the heart is still beating. New York and most states use that definition but encourage hospitals to offer a &#8220;reasonable accommodation&#8221; for families&#8217; concerns and religion. <\/p>\n<p>Hospitals don&#8217;t always comply. <span class=\"column--highlighted-text\">Families need to know they can push back, and even go to court to buy time. <\/span>One New York mother asked for a few days with her brain-dead 3-year-old daughter, because once her daughter is gone, &#8220;she is gone forever.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Battling a hospital&#8217;s legal team is daunting and expensive, but religious and right-to-life groups often help. <\/p>\n<p>Hospitals sometimes claim it&#8217;s in the child&#8217;s &#8220;best interest&#8221; to pull the plug without delay. Don&#8217;t believe it. Seldom are brain-damaged patients in pain that would justify ending life, explains Oxford University professor Julian Savulescu.<\/p>\n<p>Besides, who knows a child&#8217;s best interest better than parents? <\/p>\n<p>Hospitals argue that pulling the plug preserves the patient&#8217;s &#8220;dignity.&#8221; Archie&#8217;s parents were told that nonsense. As a family friend at Archie&#8217;s bedside said, &#8220;There is absolutely nothing dignified about watching a family member or child suffocate.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Hospital staff are not intentionally cruel, but they become inured to death and impatient with families.<\/p>\n<p>Beware when they claim ending life is &#8220;immensely complex&#8221; and appropriately left to experts, as they said about Archie. <\/p>\n<p>The Hippocratic Oath, though somewhat out of fashion, spells out what a doctor should do: &#8220;I must tread with care in matters of life and death &#8230; Above all, I must not play at God.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>The medical establishment needs to follow that timeless advice and help families deal with death on their terms. <\/p>\n<p>Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and chairman of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey. To find out more about Betsy McCaughey and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.<\/p>\n<p itemprop=\"imageCaption\"><small>Photo credit: <a href=\"https:\/\/pixabay.com\/goto\/4280497\/\" rel=\"external noopener\" target=\"_blank\">fernandozhiminaicela<\/a> at Pixabay<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Hospitals need to back off their authoritarian &#8220;we know best&#8221; posture and respect what a patient&#8217;s family wants. At 10 a.m. Saturday, Royal London Hospital stopped life support for<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1600867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1600586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1600586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1600586\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1600867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1600586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1600586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1600586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}