Thursday, February 23, 2006
Getting Serious About Haleigh Poutre
Wesly J. Smith, writing at National Review Online, takes a very serious and scholarly look at the ethical, medical, and legal issues surroounding this severly injured little girl. It's great to see this kind of serious work in the wake of Terri Schiavo.
Related Tags: Haleigh Poutre, Terri Schiavo, medicine, bioethics, humanity, slavery
Within a week or so of the beating, her doctors had written her off. They apparently told Haleigh's court-appointed guardian, Harry Spence, that she was "virtually brain dead."Has it dawned on anyone that the whole reason third-party payer system erupted in this country was so that cost would not be a factor in medical decision making. The whole idea was so that we could decide how best to care for ourselves regardless of cost. But now, instead of me checking the bank balance and the available credit before deciding what to do, there are faceless committees, and massive bureacracies making cost-based decision. Smith says this
[...]
Then came the unexpected: Before "pulling the plug" on Haleigh, Spence finally decided to visit her. He was stunned. Rather than finding a little girl with "not a chance" of recovery, as doctors had described Haleigh's condition to him (as reported by the Boston Globe), Haleigh was conscious. She was able to give Spence a yellow block when asked to by a social worker and respond to other simple requests.
Laudably, Spence immediately called off the dehydration.
[...]
It wasn't always so. It used to be thought of as unthinkable to remove a feeding tube. Then, as bioethicists and others among the medical intelligentsia began to worry about the cost of caring for dependent people and the growing number of our elderly ? and as personal autonomy increasingly became a driving force in medical ethics ? some looked for a way to shorten the lives of the most marginal people without violating the law or radically distorting traditional medical values.
In such cases, medically inappropriate ANH - such as when the actively dying body can no longer assimilate sustenance - should be able to be refused as other forms of care. But when the decision is a value judgment that a person's life isn't worth living because of disability or perceived "quality of life," then the decision to dehydrate should be considerably constrained.AMEN! You see, under such circumstances, faceless bureacracies will, by default, make cost based desisions becasue it is their only value. And suddenly we find ourselves precisely where we set out not to be - with the value of human life determined by money. Thus the many comparisons to chattel slavery that arose during the Schiavo furor. They were, in the end, appropriate. Smith says:
Don't get me wrong: People can and should be able to refuse unwanted ANH for themselves, either directly or in a written advance medical directive. But it seems to me that given the certainty of death when denying a patient sustenance - and in light of the profound symbolism of refusing to provide even nourishment - a different standard should apply when third parties seek to refuse tube-supplied food and water on behalf of another.As much as I fell in love with Terri Schiavo and I fought for her, the issues were much, much larger. After her death, I think it fair to make her a symbol. Now she is a symbol of stolen humanity, of the reduction of the individual to object over which to be bargained and traded. I hope she can become a symbol of restored humanity - of our nations recognition of human value in and of itself.
Related Tags: Haleigh Poutre, Terri Schiavo, medicine, bioethics, humanity, slavery
