* Want to leave a note before posting.. I can see both sides of the story here, but in the end I can forsee abuses by the governments involved.
Terminally ill children are subjected to needless suffering amounting to “torture” by parents who refuse to allow the withdrawal of treatment because of their religious beliefs, leading doctors have claimed.
By John Bingham, Religious Affairs Editor, The Telegraph
10:00PM BST 13 Aug 2012
Parents who trust in divine intervention, even after doctors say there is no hope of survival, are putting their children through aggressive but futile treatments, they said.
In an article published in the Journal of Medical Ethics they warned that families with deeply held hopes for a “miraculous” recovery were increasingly being allowed to “stonewall” medical opinion.
The doctors, from Great Ormond Street Hospital, called for an overhaul of the legal system to reduce the weight given to parents’ religious beliefs in such cases.
Critics have accused the authors of attempting to “impose” secular values on society, irrespective of religious affiliations.
Unusually, the warning is contained in an article jointly written by specialist doctors from the neonatal intensive care unit at Great Ormond Street in London — Dr Joe Brierley and Dr Andy Petros — and the hospital’s main chaplain, the Rev Jim Linthicum.
Their article follows a review of 203 cases at the unit in which parents were advised that life support systems should be switched off.
The authors disclosed that 70 per cent of deaths at the unit followed the withdrawal of medical care.
In 186 of the 203 cases, parents and doctors agreed to stop aggressive but ultimately unsuccessful treatment.
In 17 cases, the parents insisted on continuing treatment even after lengthy discussions about the probability that it would be unsuccessful. In 11 of these, religion was the main factor influencing their decision. Some of the cases were eventually resolved after religious leaders persuaded the parents to allow the child to die, and one case went to the High Court.
In the remaining cases, no agreement could be reached because the parents were awaiting a “miracle”, the authors said.
“While it is vital to support families in such difficult times, we are increasingly concerned that deeply held belief in religion can lead to children being potentially subjected to burdensome care in expectation of ‘miraculous’ intervention,” the authors warned. “In many cases, the children about whom the decisions are being made are too young to subscribe to the religious beliefs held by their parents, yet we continue to respect the parents’ beliefs.”
Citing examples of the treatments involved, they argued that subjecting children to suffering with no scientific hope of a cure could breach article three of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture. “Spending a lifetime attached to a mechanical ventilator having every bodily function supervised and sanitised by a carer or relative, leaving no dignity or privacy to the child or adult has been argued as inhumane,” they argued.
Instead they want the process of doctors seeking court permission to withdraw treatment to be speeded up and for the law to make clear that parents’ beliefs should not be a “determining factor” in such decisions.
Although the cases included Muslim, Jewish and Roman Catholic families, the biggest obstacle the authors said they faced were less established, “fundamentalist” evangelical Christian groups with roots in the African community.
“In the Christian groups who held fervent or fundamentalist views, the parents did not engage in exploration of their religious beliefs with hospital chaplains and no religious community leaders were available to attend meetings to help discuss or reconcile the differences,” they said. “The parents had their own views or interpretation of their religion and were not prepared to discuss these tenets.” Dr Petros said it appeared to be an increasingly common situation, with one or two such cases a year at the hospital alone.
Keith Porteous Wood, the executive director of the National Secular Society, said: “This is probably the most terrible situation for any parent, but the experience and advice of doctors must not be held ransom to religious beliefs, however strongly held.”
But in an accompanying commentary, Charles Foster, an Oxford University legal expert, argued that there was a place for religion in life and death decisions. “They seem to think that because we are becoming an increasingly ‘secular society’ there is some sort of democratically ordained mandate to impose secular values on everyone,” he wrote
Categories: All Posts, Control, Inhibiting Self Determination,, Societal
Engineering Evil 