Hypocrites! Why Was Tiny Texas Baby Kicked Out of Hospital to Die?

[Octafish]

Bush signed law that allows the state and the hospital -- not the parents -- to decide when it's too expensive, uh, unfeasible to take care of a human life.

In Texas, a child was deemed unfit to live, meaning the parents couldn't afford the best health care. The baby's problem? It's lungs weren't big enough to sustain life.

From what I've read: The baby's brain was OK.

And anyway, why wasn't the kid allowed to live until a TRANSPLANT donor could be found?

Answer: The parents aren't rich enough to buy what the kid needed to stay alive. And the state sided with the profit-makers.


Baby Removed From Life Support in Texas

By KRISTIE RIEKEN
Associated Press Writer

March 15, 2005, 6:28 PM EST

HOUSTON -- A critically ill 5-month-old was taken off life support and died Tuesday, a day after a judge cleared the way for doctors to halt care they believed to be futile. The infant's mother had fought to keep him alive.

Sun Hudson had been diagnosed with a fatal genetic disorder called thanatophoric dysplasia, a condition characterized by a tiny chest and lungs too small to support life. He had been on a ventilator since birth.

Wanda Hudson unsuccessfully fought to continue her son's medical care. She believed he needed time to grow and could eventually be weaned off the ventilator.

"I wanted life for my son," Hudson said Tuesday. "The hospital gave up on him too soon."

Texas law allows hospitals to end life support in cases such as this but requires that families be given 10 days to find another facility to care for the patient. No hospital was found to take the baby.

CONTINUED...

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-life-support-fight,0,3939619.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines

[patrice]

1. No Brain = Okay. No Lungs = Too Bad for You! . . . . . ? n/t

[Octafish]

8. Culture of life? Bush means Death.

My Roman Catholic church folk beat a steady drum before the election, without naming the turd Bush, but it was clear who they meant: "Vote for the Culture of Life."

My wife and I love the church. But we are furious about its direction. Where's the leadership? Doesn't the Truth matter? Bush is a Vulture of Death!

[patrice]

11. I miss Mass a lot, but I won't go.

With war profiteering rooted in the middle class jobs base now, ALL life is commoditized, just like grain futures. We are oil futures. And my church made it happen.

[Melynn]

29. No money + illnesses = Too Bad for You!

The Bush Texas bill allows hospitals to make life and death decisions when the patient has no money.

Sometimes, Bush just makes me so sick that I could: :puke:

[dennis4868]

2. In order to be a repub.....

you have to be a hypocrite....no doubt about it!

[Octafish]

17. Conservatives made "Republican" a bad word.

"A conservative government is an organized hypocrisy." -- Benjamin Disraeli

Today's conservatives are even worse tahn in old Disraeli's day. These're NAZIs.

[blondeatlast]

45. In Phoenix, there is a park with a statue of Barry Goldwater, rumor has

it that it's been spinning with every report from Pinellas.

He was a great believer in keeping government out ot private life and a huge supporter of Planned Parenthood.

I never in my life thought I'd say this, but can we please have the Goldwater conservatives back? Please???

[Az]

3. Because there was no political opportunity to be had

It would only result in damage for the right. Thus they have no interest in it.

The Schiavo case smacked of all the things they love. The left would naturally jump to the side of "death" and they could play the part of life loving compassionate conservatives. Energize their religious base and rub the lefts nose in it at the same time.

[FreedomAngel82]

6. And another thing

is this family (Schavio) claims to be Catholic so perfect. Plus their color and location helps too.

[Octafish]

18. Wish the DNC hired you to help enunciate policies and positions.

The current in-crowd isn't getting the job done of putting things into words. The reason DEMs "naturally jump to the side of death" is that Rove frames it that way and the echo chamber repeats it.

What's sad -- no, dangerous -- is that Corporate McPravda repeats the message verbatim 24/7 360-degrees at maximum volume.

But wait. It gets worse.

The hard part is that once an idea gets into a person’s head, it’s hard to get out. And the first idea in takes a deeper route every time it’s refuted makes it doubly difficult to drive the false idea out.

Well. All we got is the internets and the Truth. D’ya think that’s enough?

[Divernan]

4. If you don't have the $$$ or the press coverage to benefit Bush,

Bush's philosophy is you deserve to die. Religious values/beliefs and/or the family's wishes are not germane.

[me b zola]

10. That baby's death was due to no $$

The bill that * signed into law allows the hospital to discontinue life saving treatment against the family's or even the patient's wishes if they have a poor prognosis and no ability to pay.

Don't we have any DUers in the area who would be willing to take pictures of this infant to show to the hysterical fundies to show them the truth about their hero, shrubya???

[patrice]

14. Pretty much describes my sister's situation.

"poor prognosis and no ability to pay." She worked for the county for 23 years, took the same job with a different county, comes a political change, job disappears along with her health care. She was diagnosed with multiple myloma in January.

[me b zola]

16. I am so sorry to hear that

Please tell me that you don't live in Texas. Not being in any state without insurence with such an awful diagnosis is a good thing. I so believe that health care is a right, not a privalige, particularly in a Nation with such obscene wealth.

I will hold your sister, you, & your family in my prayers (hope I don't offend).

:hug: You are not alone.








spell check not working

[patrice]

56. Kansas.

Thank you for the prayers, we are in kind of a bad place about this since one of my older sisters, 57 years old, died of lung cancer just before Christmas.

And no you don't offend, I am grateful that you care enough to do something even if I didn't believe in what you are doing. Thank you.

[Octafish]

19. Poppy, IIRC, calls us proles "OFUs." One Fodder Unit.

Five Minutes 'til Midnight

"What is victory? I say victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that will be over in a month or a year or even five years. It is something we need to do so that we can continue to live in a world with powerful weapons and with people who are willing to use those powerful weapons. And we can do that. That would be a victory in my opinion." -- Donald Rumsfeld, December 2001

by Bridget Gibson

EXCERPT...

Rumsfeld’s “Long Hard Slog” swallows the lives of our children, husbands, cousins, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers and marches inexorably on through the Fog of War. Today’s Death Toll in Iraq is 885. At the rate of only One a Day, by election day 2004, the death toll will exceed one thousand American Soldiers. Our lives will continue to have no other meaning than “One Fodder Unit” to feed the War Machine and fostering the Belief that throwing bodies into the conflict will resolve the misguided notion that Democracy can be had at the end of a gun or the fall of a bomb.

CONTINUED...

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6470.htm

[FreedomAngel82]

5. According to the law

if you can't pay you either have to: cough up the cash someway, find another hospital or just die. Since the mother didn't have any health insurance and was obviously out of money.... So sad. His little body had little lungs and wasn't given time to grow. I think with this baby with time he would've been fine but sadly. :cry: There was also a sixty-eight year old man who went through the same thing.

[Octafish]

20. This part of the Schiavo story is new to me.

I've tried my best to stay away from ABCNNBCBSFauxNoiseNutwork as best I can, but somehow that part of the story managed to get through to me. Thankfully.

Wow. So there it is in black and white: White people get the press and black people get the mess.

And this poor child -- doomed, but not doomed yet -- was not left to die, but killed.

There's a difference. And the law says it's OK for people to die who don't have the wherewithall to stay alive.

Wherewithall is another word for money. And that there's plent of. The rich just don't want to part with it. And they have a monkey servant in the form of the crazy moron, George Bush.

[LisaL]

24. You think that? That baby had about as much a chance

of being fine as Terri Schiavo has for a complete recovery. There is no one with this genetic disorder that is actually fine.

[jeanarrett]

50. This is absolute bull. . .

This baby had no chance at all. He was born with a rare genetic defect that did not allow his rib cage to grow large enough for his lungs to develop. He also had very short arms and legs, a large head. Usually, this condition is found in utero with pre-natal care. His mother had no prenatal care and the condition was not diagnosed until his birth. He would have suffocated and died immediately at birth (as ALL others before him had) had they not put him on life support (ventilator). He was NOT going to get better. He ribs were not going to GROW large enough. . . God almighthy, this case was all over DU just a few days ago, where were you?!

[noamnety]

7. That case was totally different

That case involved a black family. Totally different.

[Octafish]

22. Absolutely white.

A story I remember:

People judge one another based on appearance. Race jumps out at people. Great.

The thing is people who look most different can be most closely related.

Case in point: dark skinned people from sub-Saharan Africa and dark skinned people from southern India. They both have dark skins. It is a natural adaptation to the natural environment -- there's a lot of sunlight near the equator.

However, genetic researchers who examined the DNA of people from the two regions found that the two groups diverged relatively long time ago.

What's more, when compared to the light skinned people of northern Europe -- Scandinavia, land of the midnight sun and 24-hour night, from where the "Nordic" types hail -- the dark skinned DNA from from southern India was a close match.

Remember, in American image is everything. Appearance is reality. The Truth doesn't matter.

[dflprincess]

23. And, as has been pointed out in another thread,

not one word from the president about the shootings at Red Lake, Minnesota. No sympathy, not one of his phoney "prayers are with you" statements, nothing. Of course, it was just a bunch of Indians...

[Octafish]

33. Amen.

To the people like Bush, the Native Americans are Untermenschen. Bush's ancestors -- or at least those that think like him -- think it's A-OK to kill them with genocidal war, infected blankets, broken treaties, whatever. They're sub-human. That's exactly what Adolf Hitler said about the Jews, the Gypsies, the gays, the Liberals...

[alarimer]

39. He doesn't want to offend the NRA

[Warpy]

9. Children with this condition are ventilator dependent

and generally die very quickly. The lungs are constricted by congenitally deformed bones to the point of being incompatible with life. The legs are also deformed.

"Thanatophoric dysplasia, also called thanatophoric dwarfism, was discovered in 1967 by Pierre Maroteaux and his coworkers who used the Greek term "thanatophoric" meaning death-bringing."

http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=9728

An Xray of an infant with this condition is at http://medgen.genetics.utah.edu/photographs/pages/thanatophoric_dysplasia.htm
Note the squashed in and shortened appearance of the rib cage.

This child would have had a short and miserable life.

I support the decision to terminate the ventilator. I'd like to support the law behind it, but targeting it against poor people alone is unconscionable. Streamlining a procedure whereby life support can be terminated after review by an ethics committee but without a lengthy court battle with families clinging to false hope is a good idea. Restricting this possibility only to poor people is dreadful.

[Octafish]

27. Terrible condition. But that's what medical school is for.

We as a nation have the brains, manpower, and desire to work for cures -- for even seemingly fatal disorders. Most any good high school biology teacher will tell you how many students are interested in doing something about curing them.

Then why aren't there aren't more doctors on the case? The American Medical Association restricts their number in order to keep profits among each doctor "sufficiently high." It doesn't have to be that way. But that's how closely Big Business and medicine are intertwined in America.

Don't know the numbers, but in Cuba after the revolution, Castro (whom I loathe, BTW) introduced widespread public education. Funds and resources were devoted to develop state colleges and professional schools. Cuba produced so many teachers and doctors that they wiped out illiteracy and the scourge of the same diseases wiped out in the USA.

There's a different devotion to medicine in Cuba -- and not just the commie nations, but most of the industrialized, civilized world -- that medicine is a right for ALL people. In fact, Cuba's extra doctors set out to cure some of the ills in other parts of the world. Different story here in the USA. Too many American doctors, especially the types like Catkiller Frist, head for the country club.

In the Texas baby's case: Thanks for explainging the diagnosis and prognosis. Things did look bleak. They just hadn't reached the terminal stage. Why not use the time the kid had to do all possible to save him? The art and science of medicine might possibly advance or a doctor develop a new procedure, such as busting out the constricting bones and developing new ones or using the respirator until transplants could be found for the lungs. Or, perhaps better still, developing new artificial lungs.

Well, all we need are the people, resources and will to do it. Time? We know what that is. Money.

[LisaL]

28. Babies with this condition have tiny chests.

What lung transplants are you talking about? Where are you going to fit the normal size lungs?
You might as well be saying Terri Schiavo should be given a chance to have a brain transplant. But you are not saying it, are you?

[Octafish]

32. No. I'm saying "Don't give up" on the baby.

Especially if you're proposing don't give up on Terri Shiavo.

The other thing I'm saying is science and medicine, given the resources, are capable of miracles.

What's the problem with having an opinion?

[Bridget Burke]

40. There are generally experimental programs for certain conditions...

And if someone fits criteria to join the study, funds can be found to treat them.

There was nothing to offer this child. But you just suggest randomly torturing him before his death?

[REP]

43. Some People Obviously Do Not Understand Thanatophoric Dysplasia

Reporters aren't medical writers and describe the condition in very general terms; the average newspaper reader is not familiar with genetic disorders such as this one and may assume that this baby "just had trouble breathing" when they read the child was on a ventilator.

[Octafish]

55. No. You brought up "randomly torturing him before his death."

I said our nation is rich and we don't produce enough doctors. Nor do we devote the resources to medical resources that we can.

I think we can do more. Don't you?

[madeline_con]

12. Here's my take...

This has come back to bite Bush in the butt, but the child was black, so a bunch of racist, hateful fundies probably think that was o.k.

About the congressional buttinski session, it makes the Prez LOOK like he cares, 'doing all he could', etc. They probably knew full well no one was going to reinsert any tube, but it makes for warm fuzzies in the fundie rights' black little hearts, especially since they aren't smart enough to interpret basic constitutional rights.

Another interesting point is the fact that we either starve someone to death, or prolong their life against their wishes. Bush wants the Supreme Court to look into the Death with Dignity law in Oregon, cause heaven forbid someone be able to end their suffering with a doctor's help!

[Octafish]

35. Bush got a lot of his ideas from Poppy and his friends.

On Eugenics:

"The must put the most modern medical means in the service of this knowledge.... Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unworthy must not perpetuate their suffering in the body of their children.... The prevention of the faculty and opportunity to procreate on the part of the physically degenerate and mentally sick, over a period of only 600 years, would ... free humanity from an immeasurable misfortune." -- Adolph Hitler

SOURCE: http://www.tribalmessenger.org/t-secret-gov/eugenics.htm

[followthemoney]

13. Repubs are prolife with the pre-born and post-brain dead

ghoulish, no?

[northamericancitizen]

15. This last week I was thankfuul: I am not an Americian. nt

[Octafish]

36. The Bush Sterilization History

Bu(swastika)h and the neo-kkkons have a lot in kkkomon with with the ghosts of racists past. Why do they invest so much into the appearance of caring? Distraction. While the average sheep pays attention to the sideshow, the real picture develops unwatched. IMO, that is de-population of the, um, unfit. The Untermenschen who hog the world's air, water, gasoline...

Bush & Eugenics

eu·gen·ics
Pronunciation: yu-'je-niks
Function: noun
Date: 1883
: a science that deals with the improvement by control of human mating, of hereditary qualities of a race or breed

Eugenics began as a breeding science for horses in the late 19th century. In the early 1900s No. Carolina and Virginia used it to control the population of humans that were deemd inferior though mental; retardation and handicapped. Hitler's Nazi Germany expanded its use to control the population of those deemed unfit or unnecessary people: handicapped, gypsies, indigents, slavs, and Jews. This is the core of the Master Race way of thinking and it is alive and well in our world today. One can understand the need for birth control in today's world but who gets sterilized and who doesn't is not always a voluntary decision. The survivors make up the master race; the characteristics of which are highly defined by race purists. Here is a brief history.

General Draper was an advocate of eugenics. In 1932, William Draper financed the International Eugenics Congress and helped select Ernst Ruaudin as chief of the world eugenics movement. They promoted what he called Adolf Hitler's "holy, national and international racial hygienic mission." They worked closely with Prescott Bush who shared the same views on eugenics. In Prescott’s first run for office in 1950 he was exposed as an activist in the fascist eugenics movement. Due to the exposure, Prescott lost his first bid for office.

Meanwhile, General Draper founded the Population Crisis Committee, joining with the Rockefeller and Du Pont families to promote eugenics for population control. The administration of President Lyndon Johnson, advised by General Draper on the subject, began financing birth control in the tropical countries through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

General Draper was George Bush's guru on the population question. But there was also Draper's money--from that uniquely horrible source--and Draper's connections on Wall Street and abroad. Draper's son and heir, William H. Draper III, was co-chairman for finance (chief of fundraising) of the Bush-for-President national campaign organization in 1980. With George Bush in the White House, the younger Draper heads up the depopulation activities of the United Nations throughout the world.

CONTINUED...

http://www.tribalmessenger.org/t-secret-gov/eugenics.htm

[fortyfeetunder]

21. What's next for this mom?

The mother is still of childbearing age, and she just delivered a child with a rare but fatal genetic disorder. That means (from my rusty recollection of genetics) she may be a genetic carrier for that disorder, and as a result conceived with someone else with that gene...

Apparently she will not admit to Sun's human father due to her mental state, so what is going to happen when she gets pregnant again? Has the state of Texas thought of what in the hell to do?

Will she get genetic counseling so she won't gestate another kid? Or how about contraception to prevent another pregnancy? Is the state hoping she is going to practice abstinence?

Or will she be able to get prenatal care and early detection, and will abortion services be available if she ends up conceiving another child with thanatophoric dysplasia? I bet not!!

[LisaL]

26. If she decides to have more children, she will just have more children.

I don't' think anyone could stop her. But on a brighter side, she has a grown son living with his father. So, chances are, her future possible children will not have this condition.

[Octafish]

37. Good questions. Bet the BFEE has the answer.

"The per capita income gap between the developed and the developing countries is increasing, in large part the result of higher birth rates in the poorer countries.... Famine in India, unwanted babies in the United States, poverty that seemed to form an unbreakable chain for millions of people--how should we tackle these problems?.... It is quite clear that one of the major challenges of the 1970s ... will be to curb the world's fertility." -- George Bush Sr.

http://www.tribalmessenger.org/t-secret-gov/eugenics.htm

[Bridget Burke]

41. What if the father is the carrier?

The unidentified rat bastard who impregnated a woman with a tenuous grip on sanity. She didn't get prenatal care because the father of the child was The Sun & she knew he would provide.

He didn't come forward either to help her fight or to help her deal with the sad reality of the case.

[libodem]

25. They wiped out the entire City of Falujia

and then have congress and the president rush to the aide of a dying invalid. So they can proclaim the sanctity of life. And have the whole country magnitized by it.

[Octafish]

47. That's where the hypocrisy fits in: Money and Power Come First.

THOUGHTS ON THE FALLUJAH MASSACRE

Paul Jamieson - April 4 2004

The Fallujah Massacre should stand as the turning point in the illegal US occupation of Iraq.

But it won’t. And here’s why.

Oil.

As we live out our lives in the rich West we are shielded from the truth. The true brutality that exists on a global scale to maintain our ridiculously high standard of living.

One thing that grows from our wealth is the liberal attitude that it is essentially wrong to enjoy such riches at the expense of so many who have nothing. I posit that it may be too late to be having second thoughts.

Our Western concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, are only applied within our borders. Outside, in the real world, the gloves are off, and morality, ethics, and basic principles of justice and fair play simply don’t exist. The lies that are told to us by our leaders maintain the illusions that they serve the greater good. As if "good" is some quantifiable resource that can be measured and weighed.

CONTINUED...

http://www.montrealmuslimnews.net/fallujahmassacre.htm

[rucky]

30. The PHOTO tells you why the GOP doesn't care about this kid...

[KansDem]

44. Compare with this photo...

Hmmmmmm......

on edit: Do we see a "Susan Smith" moment here?

[Octafish]

48. Rich people can afford doctors who'll do what they can.

Poor people can only afford to cry.

Thanks for the photo. I won't forget the child.

[magellan]

31. Baby Hudson was severely disabled

...and odds were he would not have lived long or pleasantly. Removing his ventilator was the merciful thing to do IMHO....

But I'd still like to ask DeLay, Frist, the Bush Bros, and the self-righteous RW Christian crowd to explain why their energetic "Culture of Life" convictions in the Schiavo case weren't extended to this infant.

His prospects of life were dismal. So are Terri Schiavo's.

His mother is poor and couldn't pay for life-entending measures. The same can be said of the Schindlers, except they've had all kinds of generous pro bono offers of assistance for Terri should they win their appeal.

Significantly, the Hudson baby was truly disabled, not in a PVS. THAT should worry Disability Rights groups.

Baby Sun's fate was death by asphyxiation. But this didn't rate the attention of the RW hypocrites who are currently wringing their hands over Terri's 'inhumane starving'.

No one in Congress or the TX legislature tried to pass an unconstitutional law to stop the death of this infant, however merciful or inhumane one wants to regard the hospital's decision. There were no fiery speeches to cameras from indignant men of the cloth. No teary-eyed Right-to-Lifers protested outside the hospital when Sun was removed from the ventilator, took a few unaided breaths, and died in his mother's arms.

Some "Culture of Life". More like vultures if you ask me.

[Octafish]

49. BFEE: Vultures of Death

In my book, all the money in the world isn't worth the life of a human being. We, as a society, have the resources to tackle the most difficult tasks.

Remember the US Navy Seabees motto from World War II?

"The difficult we do at once.

The impossible takes a little longer."

President John F. Kennedy said "Let's go to the moon and do the other thing because it is hard."

For millenia it was considered nuts to say we would go to the moon. But, we as a nation did it.

JFK was saying, "Let's do the impossible." He knew that if we could do that -- if we could go into the heavens and bring a piece back to earth -- we could do most anything on earth.

Things like ending war, poverty, ignorance...disease. These are things Bush and those like him consider impossible to solve, so why bother?

[LynneSin]

34. You forgot to mention that it was a black baby

And black babies tend to vote democrat - so why bother keeping them alive

:shrug:

:eyes: heavy sarcasm :eyes:

[Bridget Burke]

38. Baby Sun would never have lived to be a voter.

The "best" possible prognosis was a few years of pain & severe retardataion before an early death.

[REP]

42. Thanatophoric Dysplasia is a Lethal Disorder; Transplant Impossible

There is no treatment or transplant that would have saved the life of that child. Additionally, his brain was not normal; he had the form of the disorder that causes severe hydrocephaly and abnormalities of the cerebral parenchyma. "Thanatophoric" literally means "death-bringing."

[NNN0LHI]

52. Yea. One women who had it died when she was 47 years old

http://www.madisonsfoundation.org/content/3/1/display.asp?did=576

PROGNOSIS: Pregnancy with an infant with thanatophoric dysplasia can be complicated by premature birth, excess amniotic fluid around the infant (polyhydramnios), abnormal positioning in the uterus (for example, laying sideways or buttocks down in the breech position rather than head down), and/or inability for the infant to be born vaginally due to the head being too large and/or the neck being in a rigid abnormal position. Most infants with this condition die within the first few hours or days. Parents are faced with decisions regarding the degree of extreme life support measures that they desire for their child. Although there have been rare cases of long term survivors, (children ages 3, 4, and 9 years old have been described, in addition to a 47 year old woman), all have required breathing assistance by a machine, a great deal of medical help, and have some degree of neurologic abnormality and mental retardation in addition to the skeletal abnormalities.

[ComerPerro]

46. No money, wrong skin color

[Octafish]

54. Can't see past those two sins.

Deadly sins they are. Imagine the cheek of some people.


Fascism's "scientific" face

by Tom Burghardt, Editor, Anti-fascist Info-Bulletin
The Guardian October 4, 2000

Under cover of "national security", gruesome Nazi-like projects were carried out by the US National Security State throughout the Cold War period and beyond.

When revelations emerged several years ago that the US Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) sponsored "medical" research that injected gravely ill patients with radioactive plutonium with neither their knowledge nor their consent, a firestorm gripped Washington.

It forced the Energy Department to release thousands of pages of files documenting the hideous trail of suffering and death inflicted by government-funded "research". (See Eileen Welsome's 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning series, "The Plutonium Experiment" in The Albuquerque Journal, November 15-17 1993.)

Now a new book slated for release in October by investigative journalist Patrick Tierney, Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon (New York, W W Norton & Co), threatens to rip the mask of respectability from the faces of several prominent anthropologists.

Tierney's book claims certain scientists conducted genocidal experiments on the Yanomami people of Venezuela in the late 1960s — with funds provided once again by the AEC.

CONTINUED...

http://www.cpa.org.au/garchve3/1019fasc.html

[leftofthedial]

51. pull your mom's feeding tube now!

preemption is okay now

[Octafish]

53. While we're at it, let's repeal the inheritance tax.

Thank Zardoz Tom DeLay's on the job.

Long live greed!