Look who's alive today, and able to spell out entire sentences using alphabet letters?
Why, it's Haleigh Poutre, who was diagnosed as being in an "irreversible vegetative state" in 2005, and almost removed from life support. Wrong, wrong, wrong:
Last winter, just as the state’s highest court was about to rule that a girl in an "irreversible vegetative state" should be removed from life support, 14-year-old Haleigh Poutre started to breathe on her own.
Haleigh, who spent the past two years at a pediatric rehabilitation hospital in Brighton, Mass., suffered a near-fatal head injury in September 2005.
Communicating with simple words and hand gestures and by spelling out full sentences by pointing to alphabet letters on a board Haleigh in December described to police the intense physical abuse she allegedly suffered at the hands of her adoptive mother and stepfather, Holli and Jason Strickland, The Boston Globe reported on Tuesday.
Incidentally, Haleigh’s sister, Samantha Poutre, has given police a new statement about Haleigh’s injury, which put her in a coma. Samantha initially told investigators that Haleigh was practicing a back flip when she hit her head on a basement pipe, according to defense lawyers.
Now, Samantha is saying that Jason Strickland kicked Haleigh down a flight of stairs.
. . . . Jason Strickland brought a bruised and unconscious Haleigh to the emergency room of Noble Hospital in Westfield, Mass., on Sept. 11, 2005. He told medical professionals she had become unresponsive after suffering flu-like symptoms.
The Department of Social Services took custody of the Stricklands’ two other children within two days; one week later the couple was criminally charged with assault and battery in connection with Haleigh’s injury, according to the newspaper.
Did I mention that Haleigh Poutre almost lost her life as a result of the bad judgment of medical professionals, social workers, and judges? Here's the backstory, from my post here on February 8, 2006:
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.
Now we have a girl who is very much alive and conscious. She is a thinking, feeling human being able to, perhaps, testify against her abusers. (The defense may have Haleigh's testimony thrown out, claiming that she lacks competency to testify.)
How many more men, women, and children like Haleigh have been erroneously deemed "vegetatitve" and removed from life support, thereby terminating lives that still held promise and hope? We can't know, but this story must surely give us pause.
There are many more procedural protections in place to save the lives of convicted killers than there are to save the lives of innocent men, women, and children who suffer brain injuries and whose prognosis is uncertain.
We must tip the balance back in favor of innocent life.
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