Schools Ponder Role As Child Nears Death
from BFP, Bint, MissCripChick, and others:
Schools Ponder Role As Child Nears Death
As the school bus rolled to a stop outside her Lake County home, Beth Jones adjusted the bright yellow document protruding from the pouch of her daughter's wheelchair, making sure it was clearly visible.
In bold letters it warned, "Do Not Resuscitate."
The DNR ( Read more... )
Schools Ponder Role As Child Nears Death
As the school bus rolled to a stop outside her Lake County home, Beth Jones adjusted the bright yellow document protruding from the pouch of her daughter's wheelchair, making sure it was clearly visible.
In bold letters it warned, "Do Not Resuscitate."
The DNR ( Read more... )
That said, I don't think in any case that anyone has the right* to put a DNR order on anyone else - even if they do (such as parent and child) have legal guardianship over someone. There should be no way that anyone but Katie gets to make that choice; and if it is ruled that as a seven year old**, she can't make that decision for herself, there can be no DNR order on her.
*I'm not sure on the legality, I'm speaking in terms of morals and ethics.
**That could lead to a whole side discussion on how much decision-making is appropriate to allow children, but able-bodiedness should have NOTHING to do with it.
This whole concept that legal guardianship allows someone to make decisions as if they were another person rather than make a limited set of decisions for a person terrifies me to no end.
And the comments to the original article were pretty disgusting; an able-bodied child could die or suffer serious trauma in front of their kids - should they never let their kids interact with another human being because we're all mortal, fragile things? It's not really historically normal to be so sheltered from death and mortality (and the degree of sheltering in the Global North is still dependent on a whole big intersection of privileges), and, you know, people learn to deal with what is a natural part of life.
Putting a big sign on a little girl that says "don't expend the effort on me you would on anything else" without it being her own informed, educated non-coerced decision is WAY MORE harmful for children to see, I feel like it's flat out telling them that able-bodied lives are worth more than the lives of people who aren't able-bodied.
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But the thing about no one being able to make a DNR order for someone else, that strikes me as problematic too. I work with kids, newborns sometimes. And I could see some kids put on vents because of this and then kept there, in the hospital for years and years until they turned 18. I am talking about potentially hundreds of children.
The hospital is a great place to get acute care but no place to live. As things stand now there are few long term care facilities for children with vents, not that a long term care facility is always a great place to live either. And sadly, not every place can support children with home ventilation. Not every family can even take care of a kid with a trach, even if they want to.
I guess I'm just saying the ethics of "save everyone and keep them going indefinitely" can be problematic too. And if it is truly an informed decision, I'm not sure I have a problem with the parents making it. Either decision.
Not that I have a better answer.
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It may be very similar, such that I'm drawing a distinction without a difference. But there's something sinister to me about what I read as "we won't even try", rather than pulling a plug, which I read as "we did all we could, and the decision is whether more of this is a good life."
And I don't mean when I said I'm worried about the way doctors' duties are being said to need "changing" that I think saving life should be a doc's only or even highest priority. I'm quite aware that a doctor's decision making is much more complex than that. I just worry when it's presented as "we need to replace this old model" and not even stated what the new model might look like. Bioethics issues are just too important to leave it at that, IMO.
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I could be wrong.
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