Escaping the Texas Futile Care Law

We've covered several distressing cases involving the infamous Texas Futile Care Law that grants hospitals "the immoral power over life and death and forces beleaguered families into an 11th-hour scramble to save their loved ones." Howard Witt, a Chicago Tribune senior correspondent, has written an excellent article (HT: BlogsforTerri) covering the case of Kalilah Roberson-Reese:

HOUSTON -- If it had been up to her doctors, the Houston hospital where she was treated and the laws of the state of Texas, Kalilah Roberson-Reese would be dead by now.

Instead, the severely brain-damaged 29-year-old woman is being cared for in a Lubbock nursing home, where she's become a focal point in a growing struggle over a controversial Texas law that permits hospitals to withdraw life support from patients whose conditions they deem hopeless -- even if family members object.

As Witt explains, and as we've observed on several occasions, under the state's ridiculous Futile Care Law, a hospital seeking to discontinue treatment can pull the plug on a patient after giving the family 10 days to find an alternate facility. (Note that 10 days is completely inadequate and few are able to meet this deadline)

"This law allows doctors and hospitals to abandon patients and provides them safe harbor and immunity to do it," said Jerri Ward, an Austin attorney who has filed several lawsuits to prevent doctors from ending treatment. "The Hippocratic oath has morphed from treating illness and saving people's lives to allowing doctors to make subjective quality-of-life decisions about ... who should die."

Jerri Ward has been instrumental in helping families find alternate facilities and working with hospitals, often obtaining more time for the family. We certainly hope the future brings changes to both the law and the mindset that has brought about the present circumstances enabling the unilateral withdrawal of treatment against the wishes of the patient and family.

Wesley Smith has more: dying isn't dead: It is living. If doctors and bioethics committees are given the right to refuse wanted life-sustaining treatment--including tube-supplied sustenance--based on their judgments about the quality of a patient's life, then the most fundamental purpose of medicine has been subverted.