LIFE DIGEST: Injured Delaware woman faces all too common death by starvation
- Feb 12, 2008 - 5
A young, severely brain injured Delaware woman is at the center of a court battle between her parents that could result in death by starvation and dehydration for her – and such a result would not be an unusual occurrence, a pro-life, bioethics specialist says.
Randy Richardson and Edith Towers are locked in a fight over the fate of their daughter, Lauren Richardson, 26, whom a judge has ruled is in a “persistent vegetative state” after an accidental heroin overdose, according to The Wilmington (Del.) News Journal. Lauren was pregnant when she suffered the brain injury in August 2006 and put on life support in order to save her baby, whom she gave birth to several months later.
After the birth, the parents began battling over Lauren’s care. Towers says her daughter had expressed a desire not to live in such a condition, while Richardson refutes his former wife’s assertion, The New Journal reported. A judge granted guardianship to Towers in January, which could lead to removal of her feeding tube. Richardson, however, appealed the ruling, blocking any withdrawal of treatment for now.
The case is reminiscent to that of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who was described as being in a “persistent vegetative state” and died in 2005. A court granted her husband’s wishes that her feeding tube be removed over the opposition of her parents.
Sadly, such cases as those of Lauren and Terri are all too common but rarely reported, said Wesley Smith, a lawyer for the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide.
“Dehydrating the cognitively devastated is a ubiquitous practice in U.S. hospitals and nursing homes,” Smith wrote Feb. 1 on the weblog bioethics.com. “It isn’t even controversial unless . . . there is a family division and someone kicks up a fuss. Usually, families go along and no one is the wiser.
“Let me repeat this sickening fact: The dehydration of people who are elderly stroke or dementia patients, people of all ages with brain injuries and others with profound cognitive incapacities who require feeding tubes goes on ALL THE TIME in ALL FIFTY STATES to people who are both CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS,” he said. “And society generally applauds.”
Best for disabled to be aborted, Lords member says
It would be in “the best interests” of severely disabled babies if they were killed before birth, a member of the British House of Lords said recently.
Molly Baroness Meacher cited two children with severe celebral palsy during debate Jan. 29, saying, “Those two children cannot breathe naturally; they have to be helped to breathe. They will never talk. They lie on their backs and can do nothing.
“My belief is that there are children, born at those very early ages, who are not viable people,” she said, according to LifeSiteNews.com. “It would be in their best interests to have been aborted.”
Meacher’s comments affirming a quality of life, rather than a sanctity of life, ethic came during debate on an amendment to bar abortion for unborn, impaired children after 24 weeks of gestation. British law permits abortion of disabled children until birth. The amendment fell woefully short of passage in an 89-22 vote, LifeSiteNews reported.
Pro-life bioethics specialist Wesley Smith mocked Meacher’s philosophy.
“Why limit the killing of the disabled to abortion?” Smith wrote on the weblog bioethics.com. “Why not kill babies that make it to birth with serious disabilities like they do regularly in the Netherlands? Indeed, why limit the killing to babies? After seriously injured or ill patients become non-viable people let’s jut put their heads on the chopping block, so to speak, and put us, er I mean them, out of our, er I mean, their misery?
“There was a time when such bigoted sentiments would have led to shunning,” he said. “People saw it for the naked bigotry that it is. No more. These attitudes permeate the elite and medical intelligentsia and are seeping into society.”
Frozen stem cells save toddler
Frozen, non-embryonic stem cells have been credited with saving the life of a 2-year-old English girl with a rare form of cancer.
Sorrel Mason of Great Wratting in Suffolk has made a total recovery from acute myeloid leukemia after receiving a transplant of stem cells from an umbilical cord frozen in Japan, according to a Feb. 6 report in the Daily Mail, a British newspaper. Before last year’s transplant, Sorrel had been given only a 30 per cent chance of survival.
Samantha Mason, Sorrel’s mother, thanked doctors for what she described as “a miracle.”
“Sorrel would be dead now if she had been left untreated,” Samantha said, according to the Daily Mail. “The outlook was very bleak as there was no bone marrow which had even a close resemblance to Sorrel’s.
“The stem cells frozen in Japan were the only match in the world which could have been used. They were the most terrifying months our family could live with, but the doctors pulled off a miracle for us.”
The successful transplant provided more evidence of the therapeutic value of non-embryonic stem cells, which have now produced therapies for at least 73 human ailments, according to Do No Harm, a coalition promoting ethics in research. Embryonic stem cell research, which requires the destruction of human embryos, has yet to treat any diseases in human beings.
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