Tube supplied hydration and nutrition is deemed a medical treatment, like aspirin, surgery, or chemotherapy, and hence, can be denied or withdrawn under the law. Normal receipt of food and water, is not allowed to be withheld when it can be taken, since that isn’t medical treatment. Still, take away either form of sustenance from infants (or adults) and they will die.
A disturbing study has come out about how long it takes to starve an infant to death, I assume by withdrawing tube-supplied sustenance. (I hope so!) From the study (may need to register, my links to the conditions mentioned):
Neonatal survival after withdrawal of artificial hydration and nutrition can last up to 26 days, according to a case series presented here at the 18th International Congress on Palliative Care. Although physical distress is not apparent in the infants, the psychological distress of parents and clinicians builds with the length of survival, said Hal Siden, MD, from Canuck Place Children’s Hospice in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“These babies live much, much longer than anybody expects. I think that neonatologists and nurses and palliative care clinicians need to be alerted to this,” he said. “The time between withdrawal of feeding and end of life is something that is not predictable, and you need to be cautioned very strongly about that if you are going to do this work.” He presented a series of 5 cases that clinicians at his hospice had overseen over a 5-year period. Two infants had severe neurologic impairment, 2 had severe hypoxic ischemia, and 1 had severe bowel atresia.
This means that these infants did not die from the underlying conditions:
Despite this, there is one factor that medication cannot alleviate, and that is the visual signs of emaciation, said Ms. Keats. “The longer a child lives, the more emaciated he or she becomes. This is something that we as clinicians need to anticipate. You can alleviate some of the physical symptoms, but this is one symptom, or result of our action, that we can’t relieve. A critical factor for counseling is to anticipate the kind of suffering that comes with witnessing the emaciation. It isn’t something people can prepare themselves for.”Autopsies are often encouraged in such neonatal palliative care cases to help both parents and medical staff gain a better understanding of the reasons for the death, said Dr. Siden. Parents should be warned that the report will document the technical cause of death as “starvation” — a loaded word for all concerned. It is important that parents separate this word from any notion of suffering, he said.
The study wants infants being dehydrated to become research subjects on the physiological processes of being starved:
“All of the children we’ve cared for have been in a very quiet, low metabolic state — not an agitated state — with no overt signs of hunger behavior. Whether they are neurologically capable of hunger behavior is another question, and I don’t know the answer. That’s why I am trying to understand better what they are going through, because I don’t want them to suffer,” Dr. Siden explained.
He emphasized the importance of more research into the physiologic processes that occur after withdrawal of fluids and nutrition so that clinicians can both inform and reassure parents. “There’s an ethical component to doing research. If you don’t do research yourself, you need to support those who do, because we desperately need to know more,” Dr. Siden asserted. “There’s a technical aspect to what we do, and we need to become really good at that because we need to be able to say to people, without a doubt, that we are going to do this and there is not going to be any kind of suffering. You’ve got to be very on top of your game.”
Perhaps it shouldn’t be deemed ethical and acceptable to take the extra step of withdrawing sustenance when the child can assimilate nutrition. Indeed, I think higher ethical standards should apply when deciding to starve or dehydrate any human being to death as a matter of refusing treatment than when withdrawing other interventions.
Maybe I am just too unsophisticated to not find this study very disturbing.
HT: M. Bowman
October 21st, 2010 | 7:31 pm
Sick. They are trying to sneekily push this crap on us in med school too.
October 21st, 2010 | 8:08 pm
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Vince Humphreys and Stand In The Gap, Wesley J. Smith. Wesley J. Smith said: It Takes a Long Time to Starve a Severely Disabled Infant to Death by Withdrawing Medically-Suppli.. http://bit.ly/aY6oAR [...]
October 21st, 2010 | 8:45 pm
Anyone who would willingly watch an infant starve over a period of twenty-five days should not be trusted alone around sharp objects, let alone as a doctor. This is monstrous.
“He emphasized the importance of more research into the physiologic processes that occur after withdrawal of fluids and nutrition so that clinicians can both inform and reassure parents.”
How about NOT STARVING THE INFANT TO DEATH. What am I missing here?
October 21st, 2010 | 10:20 pm
This is a barbaric act but I see no difference in this case then in that of the case of the adult woman, Trisha Duguay who was starved to death for 56 days. Killing is killing!
October 21st, 2010 | 11:06 pm
“A disturbing study has come out about how long it takes to starve an infant to death, I assume by withdrawing tube-supplied sustenance. (I hope so!)”
Don’t you KNOW?
October 22nd, 2010 | 8:39 am
They want to be able to reassure everybody that there is no suffering. It sounds like they are so motivated to do this that they are going to say it no matter what. They want to be “on top of the game” to reassure the parents, not to decide what is really right to do.
I also notice the implication that this is being done a lot. That, at least, is something I take from this article.
October 22nd, 2010 | 8:52 am
What a profoundly sick world we live in. How could the parents allow this? How could doctors participate in this? I can intellectually understand it, but I don’t want lunch anymore…
October 22nd, 2010 | 10:29 am
This is horrifying! It seems our medical community has become a bunch of Mengeles and Kevorkians. It just makes me ill… :(
October 22nd, 2010 | 10:55 am
This is sick beyond words.
Food and fluids, however administered, are basic care and should not be withdrawn unless medically indicated (the patient is dying and can no longer assimilate them).
Here in the UK (I imagine it’s much the same in the US) we make an ethical distinction between basic care (which must always be provided) and medical treatment (which may or may not be provided according to a rather woolly ‘best interests’ consideration). The problem we have, here at least, is that artificial nutrition and hydration has been designated ‘medical treatment’. This designation is not based on ethical but on practical criteria (it requires medical input so is therefore deemed to be a medical treatment). This literal approach neatly glosses over the huge ethical implications and plays to the favourite device of culture of death enthusiasts of changing definitions and categorisations without commensurate ethical adjustments.
That infamous 1984 quote from the pro-euthanasia bioethicist Helga Kuhse, comes to mind:
“If we can get people to accept the removal of all treatment and care–especially the removal of food and fluids–they will see what a painful way this is to die and then, in the patient’s best interests, they will accept the lethal injection”.
October 22nd, 2010 | 11:35 am
This is horrible. NO ONE should be allowed to starve to death. This is unquestionably an act of complete depravity.
October 22nd, 2010 | 3:03 pm
Sick, sick, sick. I believe the cause of death would be ‘STARVATION!” why bother with an autopsy?
Imagine the collective outrage if this were being done to animals.
October 22nd, 2010 | 3:58 pm
JustChris, it would be interesting to know whether, in Canada, the parents are allowed to demand ANH for their children. I _think_ they still have decision-making power over that in Canada. (But I’m guessing they may not in England.)
Wesley, do you know whether the parents in Canada can insist on not discontinuing food and fluids for infants?
In any event, the story makes it pretty clear how it goes: The doctors tell them there is “no suffering” and insist that this is best. Some parents might find that hard to stand up against, even if the decision were theirs to make.
October 22nd, 2010 | 5:09 pm
Good point, Pauline.
I do not understand the difference in giving a child formula through a bottle vs giving it through a tube. Were we to refuse an infant a bottle, we would be charged with neglect, and, should the child die, we would be charged with murder. What difference does it make that the child has a severe disability or illness or that he/she will die soon anyway?
I know I pose simple questions. But, I do not understand when we came to the conclusion that we can starve people to death?
What next, we should stop turning people in bed so that they can acquire the natural consequences of bed sores and die ‘naturally’ from the horrible infections that bed sores incur? Is that not as much basic care as feeding someone?
Or why are we even wasting beds on ‘these people’? Why not just pile them in a room somewhere out of signt, stopping in only on occassion to check their pulse?
Sorry for this crude comment. I just can’t imagine hardly anything crueler than intentionally starving a baby.
October 22nd, 2010 | 7:47 pm
Lydia: I think we should assume this was done with the parents’ consent. Futile care cases have happened in Canada, and made news. But the study mentions the parental upset and the need to assure them that there is “no suffering.”
Deydration of infants and other patients occurs regularly throughout the West, and we never hear about it unless a family member strongly objects.
October 22nd, 2010 | 8:53 pm
[...] Read it all at It Takes a Long Time to Starve a Severely Disabled Infant to Death by Withdrawing Medically-Supplied… [...]
October 22nd, 2010 | 10:48 pm
Makes me want to strangle the people involved.
October 23rd, 2010 | 1:56 am
It is indeed barbaric to stand by and watch an infant die slowly after withdrawal of nutrition or fluids.If a society deems it acceptable to deliberately cause such deaths it ought to find swifter and more humane means of effecting these – if it does not deem such deaths acceptable then these withdrawals should be outlawed.
However, while these actions seem revolting on a visceral level, they are not cruel. The babies involved are heavily sedated and almost certainly do not suffer in spite of the progressive emaciation. It would be “barbaric” to dismember a man and parcel out his limbs to cannibals after placing him under general anaesthesia but this far-fetched and unethical act would not cause the unfortunate man any physical distress.
Lydia and others have mentioned the apparent attempt to assure parents and everyone else that “there is no suffering”. This isn’t, in this instance, just the party line. The medical personnel involved generally believe it themselves and this belief is entirely consistent with our understanding of analgesia and nociception. It is tempting to think of these doctors as “monsters” or minor Mengeles but this would be highly unfair. Barring malpractice, feeding is never withdrawn without parental consent and the motivation for this withdrawal isn’t the convenience of the doctors but the “welfare of the child” (i.e the avoidance of future suffering). This whole idea of “death as an acceptable means of obviating pain” is a controversial one which has often been criticised (sometimes with justification) here at SHS – but it leads us to look at these actions and the people who carry them out differently.
October 23rd, 2010 | 6:52 am
“Makes me want to strangle the people involved.”
Ahh, the “pro life” attitude. Kind of like saying “support mental health or I’ll kill you.” And then they act so shocked when one of them shoots an abortion provider. Go figure.
October 23rd, 2010 | 7:35 am
History Writer writes: ““A disturbing study has come out about how long it takes to starve an infant to death, I assume by withdrawing tube-supplied sustenance. (I hope so!)”
Don’t you KNOW?”
That is the entire point- we don’t have to KNOW if we are not starving people to death- it is a moot point and useless information really. If someone is going to die then every comfort that we can provide from the simplest touch to a full belly ought to be common sense. Sadly it is not.
I do not understand why we feel the need to rush toward death (or rush others)?
October 23rd, 2010 | 8:33 am
[...] Smith notes a disturbing study which examined how long it took to starve infants to death after withdrawing nutrition and [...]
October 23rd, 2010 | 6:34 pm
[...] More details and analysis over at Secondhand Smoke. Comments (0) [...]
October 24th, 2010 | 12:54 am
Sedated or otherwise, I agree that death by starvation is completely unethical.
Yet this is an interesting topic because it raises an interesting ethical question: At what point are we reaching beyond simply treatment, and in fact tampering with human beings in order to preserve their existence for reasons that go beyond either their ‘well-being’ or that of their loved ones?
Wesley, I am sure you know I adhere to the argument that every human being has a right to their existence, pre and post- natal until death (by natural causes). But the question of death here raises important questions. When, (to be somewhat crass) do we plug-in and when do we unplug? By what measure?
I certainly think that the individual cases must stand for themselves, but if it is true that someone, let’s say is in a comma – for the sake of keeping with the content of your post let us say it is a very young child – at what point does another decide to nourish their body despite being beyond not simply the inability to feed themselves, but that their body itself denies them of the necessary functions to receive nutrition (or oxygen)? What if there is no ‘evidence’ of brain activity (this answer may appear easier but keeping in mind that the technology in this regard is getting better but it is still not perfect). Do we starve them or suffocate them? If we plug people into a machine as a treatment against death who has a right to decide when the treatment is to be deemed ‘obviously’ ineffective? Who decides at what moment time has simply demonstrated there is no hope?
If anyone would like to respond I am genuinely curious. To put it out there I am certain about my position concerning abortion, ESCR, in-vitro and the like, and I tend to maintain that we shouldn’t be plugging anyone in, but this is not an absolute statement for me since I think it completely legitimate, and indeed an ethical duty to do so in cases of premature birth, paralysis etc.
October 24th, 2010 | 3:15 am
So until they can say to people without a doubt there is no suffering, in the mean time are the babies they are observing suffering? I would think so or else how could they know for sure what they are telling people is truth? This just boils my blood. Poor babies….
“There’s a technical aspect to what we do, and we need to become really good at that because we need to be able to say to people, without a doubt, that we are going to do this and there is not going to be any kind of suffering. You’ve got to be very on top of your game.”
October 24th, 2010 | 1:27 pm
[...] Read more here… @ Secondhand Smoke | A First Things Blog Send to Facebook [...]
October 24th, 2010 | 3:41 pm
Linda: I understand your outrage but I think it is important to appreciate the motivations involved here. All the children in the study were terminally ill and had been moved from intensive care units to a hospice. The purpose of hospice care is to ensure that terminally ill patients receive emotional and physical support as they approach death. It is hence of paramount importance to the healthcare professionals that the children do not suffer. This not just something they say to comfort the parents or the media. It is, as far as we know, the truth. There is indeed “a technical aspect” to palliative care and they do need to be “on top of their game”. An anaesthesiologist could make the exact same statement and we would immediately understand the context in which to take it.
You counter, rightly, that it is impossible to be absolutely certain that the process is discomfort-free. But recall the alternative: a more prolonged and almost certainly more traumatic process of dying. These children had been dealt a poor hand by Fate – and this was not something for which the doctors were responsible. Withdrawal of nutrition and/or fluids is almost always undertaken because the parents and professionals feel it’s best for the child.
Why do I object to the practice? As stated before I feel that we, as a society, ought to make a clear choice. If we feel that it’s sometimes necessary to kill suffering neonates, we should empower healthcare workers to do this swiftly, humanely and without moral equivocation. If, on the other hand, we decide that there are no circumstances under which actions of this sort may be permitted, we should be equally firm when it comes to enforcing this. For it seems clear to me that denying an infant nutrition and discouraging others from providing it is radically different from withdrawing medical intervention. It is, I feel, ethically indistinguishable from administering a lethal injection – in both cases one embarks on a course of action the purpose and inevitable outcome of which is the death of the baby. Healthcare workers who argue that there is an ethically significant distinction are, in my opinion, deceiving themselves.
October 24th, 2010 | 4:04 pm
you are not supposed to be starved while in hospice!
October 24th, 2010 | 6:45 pm
Sounds like at least one of the actively dying neonates had a bowel obstruction.
Not a good idea to keep pumping in fluids when there’s no place for them to go.
Especially when the goal is to keep them as comfortable as possible while they’re dying.
Nor are we going to force an adult to take food or fluids (by mouth or PEG tube) when they have an obstruction.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 24th, 2010 at 8:13 pm
It is sometimes medically inappropriate to provide ANH. But more often it is based on quality of life and the point is to make the patient die. Also, sometimes bowel obstructions that can be remedied with surgery aren’t if the baby is otherwise disabled.
October 25th, 2010 | 5:04 am
I agree with Raven that withdrawing food and fluids with the intention of hastening death is ethically indistinguishable from the lethal injection. In my view designating it as medical treatment is just a device to obscure this and it should be challenged. Yes, we must make the patient as comfortable as possible for the time they have left but part of that is providing nutrition and hydration for as long as it can be assimilated.
Does anyone here know of anyone who has willingly and consciously dehydrated them selves to death, with or without ‘medication’? I certainly have never heard of such a thing and neither, for example has Dr Philip Howard:
http://www.chninternational.com/UK%20mental_incapacity_bill_dr_p_j_ho.htm
Can it be morally right to impose on an infant a death which no adult could or would endure?
As Howard explains, the normal and traditional distinction between basic care and medical treatment is that basic care covers all those things which we all need, whether in sickness or in health, to survive (warmth, hygiene, food, fluids and so on) whereas medical treatment is designed to treat a medical condition or alleviate its symptoms. As I understand it this distinction forms the basis for the traditional ethical norm that basic care must always be provided but medical treatment is, or should be, a matter of judgment on the basis of medical best interests. On this basis clearly food and fluids should come under basic care however provided. How can it be designated medical treament? What medical condition does it treat? What symptom of a medical condition does it alleviate?
If a person is dying then there may come a point where ceasing some or all life -prolonging medical treatment is justifiable because it is either futile or unduly burdensome and that is a matter of judgment. But not basic care. Providing basic care is not a matter of unduly prolonging life but of sustaining the patient until their natural end. And we have the means to keep the patient comfortable in the interim. The real question is do we have the political will to allocate sufficient resources to the necessary palliative care.
These distinctions matter and compromising them not only is intrinsically wrong but also leads us to precisely the ethical difficulty that Raven highlights.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 25th, 2010 at 10:06 am
Jack Kevorkian said give those people to him. The answer isn’t to lethally inject them. The answer is to quit withdrawing medically appropriate food and water.
October 25th, 2010 | 10:40 am
Yes, there is a movement and people are actually consciously choosing to stop eating and drinking. It has an acronym- Voluntary Discontinuance of Eating or something.
This article about how long it takes to starve an infant to death is right out of the page book of the German doctors in the 1930s. They also studied and observed with cameras how long it took to starve bed wetting, cleft-lip and disabled children to death. These physicians should look it up and maybe it will awaken their conscience.
Nothing changes does it. The spirit of the Nazi doctors is flourishing in America. Whoever is ignorant of history is doomed to repeat it.
October 25th, 2010 | 11:14 am
Pauline G:
It happens quite often that patients refuse food and water and in fact there is extensive history and discussion on the subject which can be found via a search on the term “refusing to eat”.
I don’t know if this forum and its software allows the posting of multiple links so here is one:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3689/is_200310/ai_n9330706/
October 25th, 2010 | 11:15 am
[...] Now here it is in practice. For neonatal care of chronicaly, and therefore expensive, children. It Takes a Long Time to Starve a Severely Disabled Infant to Death by Withdrawing Medically-Supplied… Thursday, October 21, 2010, 7:23 PM Wesley J. Smith Tube supplied hydration and nutrition is deemed [...]
October 25th, 2010 | 11:46 am
I should add that the existence of such discussion and a few studies or surveys (on the subject of patient refusal of food and water) is no indication that the subject has been adequately explored or studied or that enough information is publicly exposed for scrutiny.
As Wesley has pointed out the withdrawal of ANH is something that isn’t publicly exposed very often for scrutiny unless a family member or concerned party calls attention to it.
I don’t raise it here as a justification or rationale for euthanasia or assisted suicide.
I am simply replying to the query of whether anyone knows of someone who has willingly dehydrated themselves to death. It would appear it is not unheard of and apparently is a subject that has garnered at least some attention.
Wesley J. Smith Reply:
October 25th, 2010 at 12:52 pm
Some people stop eating as a natural part of the dying process. In those situations, forcing food and water is medically inappropriate. There was a woman with cerebral palsy named Elizabeth Bouvier in CA several years ago, who sued to be able to go to a hospital and starve herself to death and receive palliative care while she did so. She won, which is an awful decision. But by the time that happened, she had changed her mind, and is today, still alive.
October 25th, 2010 | 11:51 am
Notice how they want to reduce the suffering of the PARENTS (and observers) But death is seen as compassion for the child. That strikes me as a rotten deal. If my sister starved her able-bodied new-born son, they’d throw the book at her, but if my parents had decided to starve me to death and offered a list of my surgeries, even my own depression, as a defense, they’d get away with it. They’d only need to go on and on about how much pain I was in and how much a burden I was to the family and they’d get off scot-free. It’s a nightmare scenario.
I feel for anyone who suffers, but these children didn’t decide to die, someone has decided to play God.
I have seen too many people die because they were thought of as less than perfect. I’ve been yelled at, thrown on a bed, confined to a psych hospital for 18 months because my PARENTS couldn’t handle the situation. If these children were dying, there would be no need to starve them, would there?I’ve known many disabled friends who never made it to adulthood because of their disabilities and that was without someone trumpeting “quality of life” arguments. (I hate that phrase!) Where do these children go after death that is so much better than here? Are their lives so horrible, so worthless, that we must rush to get rid of them?
I grapple with cerebral palsy, severe pain and suicidal depression. I also am well aware of serious health problems. I do not expect to see sixty, but as it is. But seeing stories like this are so upsetting, it makes me wonder why I want to stay in a world that wants no part of me. Only a few loyal friends want me around.
When disabled people suffer, ask yourself: “How much of that suffering is deliberately inflicted or something omitted or neglected by man?” If people want to kill us all off, you owe it to us to tell us the REAL reasons why we being killed….there is nothing compassionate about it…we have been fighting for compassion, for basic human rights for years. If we were starving babies who were black or Jewish, there would be an uproar. Starve a disabled baby…silence at best, approval at worst.
Whoever stands for this injustice,or says nothing about it, I hope you ALL answer for it one day, down to the last man.
October 25th, 2010 | 11:56 am
A year ago I witnessed starvation and dehydration of a dear friend, who had just turned 50 years old. She aspirated on her own vomit while having an MRI done. The technician was unaware that there was a problem. The only thing she noticed was the raising of her hand during the procedure. The tragic outcome left my friend with no brain activity…at least that is what the doctors told her children…who are in their early twenties. The doctor advised her kids to take her off all nutrition even though she was breathing on her own. When I went to the hospital to visit her before her passing. She looked at me and had tears run down her face. Her eyes also followed people around the room. When a mutual friend swabbed her mouth with a sponge on a stick with water, my friends mouth clamped down on the stick and the mutual friend had a hard time getting her open her mouth to retrieve the stick. I was sickened, horrified and disheartened that everyone seemed to think that this treatment as okay. I think that my friend DID know what was going on. My friend starved to death in a weeks time. I can’t seem to shake this act of evil. I was shocked that this was legal to do…or was it? I live in Indiana.
October 25th, 2010 | 2:07 pm
The clinical myopia that these physicians espouse is akin to the Nazi experimentation on helpless prisoners. There is not even a modicum of morality or ethics in their ‘research’. Their inability to detect ‘hunger behavior’ in an obtunded infant suffering from severe neurological or gastrointestinal disease does NOT prove that these infants do not feel hunger and the untold suffering of dehydration.
If you want to perform ‘research’. Fine! Do it upon yourselves. This is nothing less than barbarism and if I had the opportunity, I would tell them to their faces.
October 25th, 2010 | 2:27 pm
I’ve always found the withdrawl of nutrition to be ethically ambiguous. For me, the line between what can and can’t be done comes down to whether we are hastening death or simply allowing dying to happen naturally.
I guess I am naive enough to have presumed that withdrawl of nutrition would only occur if a person had reached the point where they could not eat and drink anything on their own, where even the basic swallow response is no longer present. In that circumstance, it seems to me that withdrawing nutrition is ceasing an artificial intervention aimed at keeping a person alive longer than their body would allow them to be.
Maybe I don’t understand well enough what is actually occuring and when withdrawl is recommended.
October 25th, 2010 | 4:46 pm
[...] – some Canadian “doctor” has been conducting studies on severely disabled children to see how long they can will last when food and water are withheld as part of “palliative care.” Neonatal survival after [...]
October 25th, 2010 | 5:03 pm
sadistic. There is suffering
Saying something is so so dosn’t make so.
October 25th, 2010 | 5:20 pm
Jen G: Your impression is right – these withdrawals only involve patients who are being provided with artificial nutrition and hydration either through a feeding tube in the GI tract or via an intravenous line. It is thus technically accurate to describe such feeding as “medical intervention” which may be legally withdrawn. I would however argue that primary care-givers, parents and legal guardians ought to have a legal duty to provide nutrition to wards unable to obtain this nutrition themselves.
A quadriplegic child in a house stocked with food might well die “naturally” of starvation if his or her parents fail to assist. We would however expect the state to take legal action if this “natural death” resulted from either parental neglect or a conscious decision on their part to refrain from assisting. The situation, I would argue, would be the same if the child required specialised (but easily accessible) utensils for feeding.
I would be the first person to admit that sometimes medical treatment is of no further benefit to the patient. There sometime comes a point when you have to say “Enough” – and you stop the IV drugs, cardiac massage and artificial ventilation and allow the patient drift away in peace. Artificial nutrition however is not a “heroic procedure” and its withdrawal does not (as we now know) usually result in the patient’s swift demise. (And, additionally, while there is an admittedly minuscule chance that a patient denied drugs or taken off a ventilator might somehow survive, a baby who has artificial feeds removed with no further attempt made to recommence feeding will certainly die). The babies, adequately sedated, probably do not suffer but the entire process, especially when prolonged, reeks of moral equivocation and is unduly traumatic for the parents and medical professionals. It might be necessary (and given the current legal framework and the alternative outcomes for the children I actually think that it sometimes is) but it is nonetheless tragic that situations such as these arise.
October 26th, 2010 | 6:15 am
Or, again, these neonates had conditions which made ANH medically inappropriate because it would only add to their suffering as they lay dying.
Keep in mind they were already on Hospice care, so it’s clear they had underlying, terminal conditions that were not fixable by surgery or other medical interventions.
So, given the above, the article is concerned with how do you reassure the parents, who know their infant is going to die no matter what you do, but see them becoming emaciated because ANH has been discontinued.
October 26th, 2010 | 7:14 am
GOD said: I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both you and your seed (your child, your children) may live: that you may love the LORD your GOD that you may obey his voice and that you may cleave unto him: for he is your life, and the length of your days: that you may dwell in the land which the LORD sware unto your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give them. Dueteronomy 30:19-20
October 26th, 2010 | 8:59 pm
This study of the slow murder of these babies was carried out at a hospice in Vancouver, Canada.
The administration of food and water by even artificial means is “ordinary and proportionate means” of sustaining life. They are not medical means See: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20070801_risposte-usa_en.html
This practice is the epitomy of cruelty.
October 27th, 2010 | 4:11 pm
[...] at his blog on the First Things website, Wesley Smith tells us, It Takes a Long Time to Starve a Severely Disabled Infant to Death by Withdrawing Medically-Supplied…. Reporting on material presented at the 18th International Congress on Palliative Care he [...]
October 27th, 2010 | 5:36 pm
I cry every day for the helpless who are so easily forgotten in our society. Every day I beg the LORD to come, saying, ‘Even so Lord Jesus, COME’. I don’t know what else will ever put an end to suffering on this planet, but I thank you for keeping up your crusade, as I am also keeping up mine. God Love You!
November 2nd, 2010 | 11:55 am
Outside of a medical facility, anyone that starved an infant to death, and documented the process would be put to death themselves. Any mother knows, that when an infant is hungry that they do display signs of discomfort and cry or wimper for milk – this is true even as a 1 day old and it gets progressively more intense as they become hungrier and hungrier. Really? A doctor is not aware of this? This sickens me like no other thing I can imagine. Once the infant realizes that no food is coming and the normal ways of requesting food they often give up. Didn’t Pavlov discover this with dogs? Something called learned behavior? Then of course they are in a “low metabolic” state. Their tiny bodies went into shock! To conserve every bit of strength they had in hopes that someone would finally reach out to them and supply them with the much needed milk/formula they need. They don’t move because they have no energy. Why not hasten the process and turn them over and let them suffocate? Deny the infants air, that would really speed the process along and reduce the suffering. This is sick sick sick. Absolutely inexcusable.
November 12th, 2010 | 9:24 pm
[...] This one is even more disturbing (h/t Wesley Smith): In Canada a case study was presented to the 18th International Congress on Palliative Care about [...]
November 30th, 2010 | 4:28 pm
How will God have mercy on us when we don’t have mercy on the most helpless? Respect of the individual is the foundation and cornerstone of democracy.
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