Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Family stops hospital from taking boy off life support

The last fifty years have seen marvelous advancements in pharmaceuticals and technology that can save lives. In wars prior to World War II (when antibiotics first began to be used), soldiers generally died of infections and contagious diseases more than they did from the impact of bullets and shells. A wounded infantryman today can be evacuated from Iraq and treated in the most modern of military hospitals in Germany within hours.

Victims of crime who once would have died because the methods of a cure weren't in existance now have those methods available to them in virtually every large hospital in the country.

But there is a financial price for such treatment and some physicians and hospital administrators don't want to provide what were once miraculous cures even though they have become routine today.

Catholic Dad who has the Catholic Family Campaign blog raises the issue of a case that is going on right now at the University of Kansas hospital. He has no answers, but we all should be thinking about the question.


The mother of a 14-year-old gunshot victim now in the middle of a legal fight over whether he's medically dead said she's not backing down in her battle to keep a hospital from taking him off life support. But Cecelia B. Cole also said the University of Kansas Hospital just wants to harvest her son's organs.

"You can't twist my arm and make me pull the plug on my son," Cole said Tuesday outside the Wyandotte County Courthouse after appearing for a court hearing that was postponed. "There's always hope."
KMBC-TV News

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