GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: British infant has life support withdrawn after court battle

domingo, 4 de febrero de 2018

British infant has life support withdrawn after court battle

British infant has life support withdrawn after court battle

Bioedge

British infant has life support withdrawn after court battle

by Xavier Symons | 3 Feb 2018 |

A British High Court judge has told doctors that they can remove life support from an 11-month old baby boy, after a failed appeal by the boy’s parents.

Justice Alisdair MacDonald said Monday that it was not in Isaiah Haastrup’s best interests to continue treatment, ruling in favour of specialists from King’s College Hospital in London:

“Examining Isaiah’s best interests from a broad perspective ... I am satisfied that it is not in his best interests for life-sustaining medical treatment to be continued. That, with profound sadness, is my judgment.”

The case had been heard in the Family Division of the High Court in London.

Specialists at King’s College Hospital told the court that further intensive treatment would be “futile, burdensome and not in his best interests”. Haastrup had suffered “catastrophic” brain damage at birth as a result of oxygen deprivation, and had remained unresponsive since then, the doctors said.

Haastrup’s parents had claimed that the boy responded to his mother’s face and touch.

The case comes just months after a High Court decision to allow for the removal of life-support from Charlie Gard, an British infant suffering from mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome.

Saturday, February 3, 2018

For years bioethicists of a utilitarian cast have argued that conscientious objection has no place in medicine. Now Canadian courts are beginning to put their stamp of approval on the extinction of doctors’ right to refuse to kill their patients.

The Superior Court of Justice Division Court of Ontario ruled this week that if doctors are unwilling to perform legal actions, they should find another job (see report in BioEdge).

The case is sure to be appealed, but if the doctors championing conscientious objection fail, the consequences will be dire. Throughout Canada, doctors would be required to refer for euthanasia. If they refuse, they will be hounded out of their profession, or, at best, shunted into specialties where the question will not arise, like pathology or dermatology.

This ruling shows how quickly tolerance vanishes after euthanasia has been legalised. In the Carter decision which legalised it, Canada’s Supreme Court explicitly stated that legalizing euthanasia did not entail a duty on the part of physicians to provide it. Now, however, 18 months and more than a thousand death after legalisation, conscientious objection is at risk.

It also shows how vulnerable religious-based arguments can be. The plaintiffs contended that referring patients violated their right to religious freedom. While this is true, is this the main ground for conscientious objection? As several doctors pointed out in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year, “Insofar as all refusals of therapy are ultimately justified by the ethical belief that the goal of therapy is to provide benefit and avoid harm, all treatment refusals are matters of conscience.”