A mother's love trumps medical know-it-alls

One of the most heart-breaking medical tragedies of recent years occurred earlier this month when a 13-year-old girl woke up from surgery for a tonsillectomy, asked for a popsicle, and then started bleeding profusely from her mouth and nose, leading to a heart attack as a result of loss of blood.

Because of lack of blood to the brain during this ordeal, young Jahi McMath has been declared brain dead by the doctors at Children’s Hospital Oakland in California, where the surgery was performed.

Ordinarily this would be the end of the story, and the beginning of the mourning, but Jahi’s mother Nailah Winkfield and her family do not want to allow the hospital to turn off life-support functions and thus force Jahi’s body to follow the brain into death. A judge on the other hand has supported the hospital, giving the family just until 5 p.m. Monday to appeal his ruling.

Now, I am not going to presume to judge whether or not Jahi’s family is right or wrong to think that a miracle — whether Christian or medical in nature — might still bring their daughter back to anything like her former state.

But what I am willing to say, without reservation, is that the decision about how to proceed with Jahi’s care is the business only of her family and no one else. As long as the family can find doctors and attendants who are willing to treat her as a living being, and as long as they can acquire the resources to pay for that care (which the family says it has done through insurance) then they should have the right to do what they believe is right, not what someone else thinks is right.

I realize this has nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act, but when we see trained medical professionals reacting so coldly to the pleas and needs of a family in a medical crisis, it can only remind me of the warning of Sarah Palin and others of the danger of turning our most personal life-and-death decisions over to bureaucrats and functionaries.

No, this is not a death panel, but do we really want to empower “you’re already dead” panels either?

In my opinion, it should not be up to the hospital that managed the catastrophic surgery in the first place to decide what the girl’s ultimate fate will be. The very callousness of the institutional mindset at work is evident in the statement issued by the hospital in response to the family’s request that feeding tubes be implanted prior to the girl’s move:

“Children’s Hospital Oakland does not believe that performing surgical procedures on the body of a deceased person is an appropriate medical practice.”

Compare that statement to the words’s of Jahi’s mother:

“I am a mother. She is my daughter. I am alive. Despite what they say, she is alive. I can touch her, she is warm. She responds to my touch. I can love her — I can feel her love. When she was in my belly I fell in love with her. Her heartbeat for the beginning of her life was my heartbeat until God, through a miracle, sparked her heart into existence. Given time, I know he will spark her brain awake.”

So who should make the decision about this girl’s future — an uncaring medical facility that gave her a bucket to bleed in when she was fighting to live? Or the mother who gave her birth?

Seems pretty obvious to me.