When in Doubt, Remove Life Support Quickly

Update:  The science of scanning for signs of brain activity in minimally conscious or "vegetative" patients is advancing rapidly.  Much is now known that was not known five or 10 years ago.  Read this October 2007 article "Silent Minds" in the New Yorker for the latest.

Original entry:

This is called not valuing life enough.

Just one week after 11-year old Haleigh Poutre was hospitalized on September 11, 2005 with brain injuries caused by child abuse, the state of Massachusetts sought a court order allowing the agency to "let" Haleigh die (by taking away all medical support, food and water needed to live).  And less than one month after Haleigh arrived at the hospital, on October 5, 2005, the court issued an order allowing Haleigh's life to be terminated.

I guess the rule is:  When in doubt, remove life support quickly. 

Neurologists have said it can take as long as a year to determine whether such a patient can recover.  "With children, it is notoriously difficult to prognosticate following a brain injury," Dr. David Clive, a medical ethicist at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, said last week. "They're supposed to have greater resiliency than an adult, and there are more stories of miraculous or late recoveries with kids than with adults. Here you have a child who needs to be given a longer window of observation before you assume the worst."

Social services spokeswoman Denise Monteiro said the agency sought approval to remove Haleigh's feeding tube and ventilator so they could have "options" in handling her case.

Let's not play games here.  The "option" that was sought was the option to remove life support prematurely, before anyone could determine whether death was inevitable or how much recovery was possible for Haleigh. 

And once the judge gave the premature approval to terminate Haleigh's life, exactly which God-like person at the social services agency was going to take over the life or death decision?  What are that person's qualifications for deciding who lives or dies?  Is that how we want it to work?  A social worker gets control over the ON/OFF switch for a child's life?  That's even worse than allowing a judge to decide who lives and dies, which is obviously not ideal either because a judge here issued an order allowing Haleigh's life to be terminated at a time when rehabilitation had not even been attempted and nobody could accurately predict Haleigh's prognosis.

I realize that Haleigh is just somebody's kid.  She's nobody special.  Her caretakers didn't care about her, as far as we know.  She was nobody special at all, except in the sense that every one of us is special.

But as humans with consciences and souls, we should care.  Where the adults responsible for this innocent child's life failed and committed or allowed criminal acts against her, we can and should step in to fill the gap, to help any way we can, and to help Haleigh salvage as much as possible of what's left of her life.

We should help her even if her prognosis is discouraging and her recovery is minimal.  We should help her even if she never again enjoys the same quality of life that God gave her.

You'd do that much for an adult firefighter.  You'd wait.  And once in a while, your long, long wait would be rewarded (Fireman's Recovery Stuns Doctors). 

You'd do that much for a soldier on life support with a brain injury.  You'd wait a long, long time.  You'd wait a good, long time for a president or other head of state, even if the chances of recovery were poorer for them than they are for Haleigh.

Haleigh's life is not less valuable than any of theirs.

God planted the same seeds of greatness within Haleigh that he planted in the firefighter, in the soldier, in the head of state, and in every one of us.

It comes down to whether every human life is precious.

Or disposable.

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Update 10/10/06:  An Oregon boy in a coma for 22 months has awakened.