Pulling the plug against the family's wishes

[Kitsune]

Feeding tube all over again? Sort of. This one is complicated.

Emilio is 17 months old and has a rare genetic disorder that's ravaging his central nervous system. He cannot see, speak, or eat. A ventilator breathes for him in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Austin Children's Hospital, where he's been since December. Without the ventilator, Emilio would die within hours.

The hospital contends that keeping Emilio alive on a ventilator is painful for the toddler and useless against his illness -- Leigh's disease, a rare degenerative disorder that has no cure.

Under Texas law, Children's has the right to withdraw life support if medical experts deem it medically inappropriate.

Emilio's mother, Catarina Gonzales, on the other hand, is fighting to keep her son on the ventilator, allowing him to die "naturally, the way God intended."

...

Dr. Ross says that under the law, some dozen times hospitals have pulled the plug against the family's wishes. She says more often than not, the law is used against poor families. "The law is going to be used more commonly against poor, vulnerable populations. If this family could pay for a nurse to take care of the boy at home, we wouldn't be having this conversation," she said.

Emilio is on Medicaid, which usually doesn't pay for all hospital charges. The hospital's spokesman said that he doesn't know how much it's costing the hospital to keep Emilio alive, but that cost was not a consideration in the hospital's decision.

It seems awfully cruel to keep a blind, mute, immobile child in pain with no chance for recovery alive on a machine. I certainly don't see the mother's thinking in this at all.