For the second time in recent weeks the controversial Baby Joseph case has erupted across the international boundary from Canada into the United States.
A Washington, D.C., Christian law group is helping to find medical treatment for the 13-month-old baby in the U.S.
Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, said, “This has been a tragic case where the parents desire only to receive proper family-centered care and medical attention that will allow Baby Joseph to live out his final days at home naturally with his family.”
Ironically, the ACLJ advertises a DVD titled “The Dangers of Radical Islam” on its website, while Baby Joseph’s family is devout Muslim. Indeed, one of the family’s disputes with the London (Ontario) Health Sciences Center is over Moe Maraachli’s desire to pray privately with his son. But staff won’t let that happen because their disagreement over Joseph’s fate has become so bitter and high profile.
The hospital precipitated the standoff last month when it sought the family’s permission to remove Joseph from his ventilator. This would have led to suffocation due to his progressive neurodegenerative disease, which his doctors say is fatal anyway.
The Maraachlis want to bring Joseph home to die, but to do so he must be removed from his ventilator and given a tracheostomy.
The hospital has refused to do a tracheostomy, insisting “it is not a palliative procedure. It is an invasive procedure in which a device is installed in a hole cut in the throat.”
For its part, the family refused permission to disconnect, then went public over it, then viral, with a save-baby-joseph Facebook page, a petition site by the same name and YouTube videos showing the baby, who the hospital claimed was vegetative, responding to tickling.
The story crossed the border when a Detroit hospital initially agreed to examine Joseph but then reneged. Fox News jumped on the story anyway, and in the resulting furor the staff at London Health Sciences Centre was subjected to death threats and accusations of murder and euthanasia.
The hospital has secured favorable rulings from both a judge and the Ontario Consent and Capacity Board, but the family has nonetheless gotten the hospital to hold off. Now the latter is insisting it was always willing to let Joseph go home — without a tracheostomy.
Family spokesman Sam Sansalone says this simply is untrue. “No one in the family knew anything about an offer to let him come home until they read about it in the news media.”
One of Sansalone’s own daughters is cognitively disabled, and he has championed the cause of families like the Maraachlis for a decade as they fight medical professionals for control of their loved ones’ care.
Sansalone has studied medical outcomes in the U.S. and Canada and says his data suggests, disturbingly, that, “Someone with my daughter’s disabilities is four to 10 times likelier to survive in the U.S.”
In Canada generally, he says, there is a trend “to strip the human rights of the cognitively disabled infant. It is spreading like a disease, putting at risk anyone who isn’t contributing much to the GDP.”
Sansalone isn’t willing to attribute the higher death rate for children like his daughter Katya and Joseph to public health systems per se, but he does believe the way Canada’s system works is that “the same people who are making these life and-death decisions are managing the fiscal envelope. They are cutting costs by limiting treatment to the most vulnerable, the cognitively disabled infant and the elderly.”
And when the same provincial government that sets the health care budget also runs the courts, the police and the judiciary, he says, “There is a lack of independent accountability. This is a test case for human rights.”
Alex Schadendberg, executive director of the Ontario-based Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, says the Baby Joseph case illustrates the quandary families find themselves in when they disagree with hospitals and doctors over treatment of family members. “This is a very specialized area of law, and only about six lawyers here are expert in it. Four of them will only work for hospitals. Most people don’t understand you need a barracuda to fight a barracuda and so they hire a general lawyer or, in the Baby Joseph case, they started with a legal aid lawyer.”
In 1993, Ontario created the Consent and Capacity Board to resolve family-hospital disputes, but according to Schadenberg, “It’s only speeded things up, which is good, but it hasn’t shifted the serious disadvantage the family is under.”
Most decisions have gone the hospitals’ way, he says, and the burden of proof has shifted dangerously. Officially, the board decides on the basis of what is in the best interest of the patient, says Schadenberg. But in fact, the board assumes that medical professionals know better. “The onus is on the family to prove the doctor or hospital is unreasonable.”
The family got its way in one recent decision, says Schadenberg, because it found a doctor who was willing to provide the desired treatment.
That is now the route the Maraachlis are following, hoping the ACLJ can find an American institution that will take over Joseph’s care, perform the tracheostomy and allow the child to die at home.
Editor’s note: With corrections posted 10am, March 9.
Register correspondent Steve Weatherbe writes from Victoria, British Columbia.
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It is sickening that these doctors and courts have no respect at all for human life. Only God gives and takes life. He’ll take the child in His time. How arrogant we have all become..
I don’t think allowing this baby to die by suffocation is dying in peace. And these opportunistic pigs as you call them are lawyers who work for free to help families that are being let down by their own government. What kind of animals have we become that we can’t let these parents get their son a tracheostomy and take him home to die in his own home?
What kind of parent are these? Parents that love their son!
[Note: Previous comment referenced in this one used an assumed identity and was deleted by the editors.]
Well Sam, with your theory, when you are in your 60’s or 70’s or older, and the Dr. tells you that your coronary arteries are clogged, and you need a quadruple heart bypass to save your life, however, those are reserved for those people who are younger, so you can’t have that procedure to save your life, how are you going to feel? Please pipe up and tell the Dr. “No Thank you, save your money for the younger people, just let me die in peace without cutting, tubing, slicing, poking, etc.” When they withhold treatment for any financial reason, whether it be the old, the young, or the disabled, you or a loved one might fall in that category someday yourself, so you’d better fight for your rights now, while you are still young and healthy.
Saul, the people you talk about are the same ones who say “I would gladly pay more taxes…” but never do, eventhough the tax laws allow them to do so.
The entire issue is not around whether these people are muslim, or unemployed (father), or even first cousin marriage and therefore…
but the real issue is the fact that the canadian doctors at this London hospital in an unbelievable manner feel their decision (to take life.. in this case Baby Joseph and do it painfully).... trumps the parents natural rights as parents..!! If this is allowed to happen all parents of mentally handicapped (and other) beware.. Canada which has had socialism embedded into since the time of the infamous Trudeau as PM, has many liberal death zealots.. and the more Christian laws are stripped from this nation—the more people will and do suffer… ergo Baby Joseph is just one… but it is a very important One..
and the Canadian doctors must back off or be taken into a court room
Yet another instance that shows the move towards Big Brother controling every aspect of our lives. People are slumbering and as they slumber their freedoms are removed in the name of security, or healthcare reform, or any other euphanism they come up with.
Please remove the post by Lee Tilson. I find it incredibly insensitive. How tasteless of you to speak of the family in this way in their time of grief. We are all human beings. We all deserve to be treated with respect and dignity regardless of our religion, financial status, or who we choose to marry. It is heartless people like Lee that doesn’t deserve a cent from our taxpayer dollars. You need to apologize to this family and offer them your prayer and well wishes especially during this season of lent.
It seems this case is more about truth and facts versus the orchestrated public relations propaganda and the personal agenda of third party bystanders, profiteers and opportunists and even United States based special interest groups that were attracted to the case for its publicity potential and attracted to the babies parents because of their vulnerability to influence and the parents lack of familiarty with the english language, the Canadian legal system, Canadian health care regulations and Candian privacy laws regarding medical records and etc. etc.
Currently on the social networking pages created by the parents and their supposed “supporters” all manner of bizarre speculation and bizarre allegations are being made about a conspiracy existing to prevent the parents from moving the child out of the hospital. The people on these sites are feeding off each others paranoia and suspicions. The facts are readily available to dispel most of what they are frothing and foaming at the mouth about but facts and truth generally don’t serve the purpose of activists or special interest groups or those attracted to extremists and conspiracy theory.
The child is under the jurisdiction of the Canadian courts, there is pending legal action and the family has hired a lawyer to represent them. But apparently the parents and their supposed “supporters” don’t have a clue what it means to hire a lawyer. Seems the parents and the supposed “supporters” don’t understand that once the lawyer is hired the lawyer is the only official representative and no one is going to discuss or negotiate transfers or moves or changes in treatment plans except via the hired lawyer.
Certainly no one is going to be complicit with trying to remove the child from the hospital (or the country to be flown to a hospital in the United States) without informing the court and without the courts involvement (the court case is still open, the child is under court jurisdiction and there is pending litigation)
There is a growing indication that what we are dealing with is not mere bureaucratic ineptness but a genuine evil. With tens of thousands praying this wickedness is being exposed. Ephesians 5:11 commands us, “Take no part in the worthless deeds of evil and darkness; instead, rebuke and expose them.” We agree with Moses: “Let God arise and His enemies be scattered.” (Numbers 10:35)
It amazes me how truly ignorant some of these comments are on this case and our system. First off, this does and has happened in the U.S. For those throwing stones, please check out the case of Sun Hudson, a baby’s whose life support was ordered removed by a Texas court based on a law introduced by George W. Bush.
For baby Joseph, it is a sad case, but let’s be clear. This baby is being kept alive artifically. Just like EVERY case where life support is removed, the baby will be in pallitive care so he has a comfortable passing. They will not just let him suffocate to death. A world leader in these cases has agreed with LHSC on their decision, that a tracheotomy does nothing to benefit the child, and will only bring possible and probably risk and more suffering to him. Yes, their daughter had the same condition and procedure done to her, but she was not to the severity of Joseph’s. She also did not require a ventilator, and Joseph will. It has also been reported that her death was NOT at all a comfortable one either. In addition, a parent can not demand and expect a procedure be performed that is not standard of care. That is why NO other Canadian or U.S. hospital has stepped forward to do what the parents are asking.
I wish the baby the very best, but prolonging his suffering for the sake of the parents and NOT the child, is selfish.
There is a difference between mentally disabled and mentally dead. His body no longer powers itself. Machines do. He is dead. His death will not be painful; a vegetative state no longer allows for pain. I have no idea why it has been so difficult for people to differentiate between these two states of alive and not alive.
to say that canadian proffesionals want to kill a baby is lies!no hospital in the world has stepped up to take this child because he is getting the care he needs. while i appreciate the marvels of modern medicine i do not agree to life just for the sake of life. i am not a christian but if i was i would say god has called this child home and no one is listening! i truly am sorry for the familys pain. i cannot imagine how hard it would be to be manipulated by so many “well wishers”.
Dear americans please go home and protest the sensless killing of so many iraqie men women and children that your army is responsible for. instead of the wonderfull care this child has recieved by our doctors and hospitals. we canadians do not have a hiddan agenda for murdering babys. thank you
We Americans do not have a hidden agenda for murdering babies either. Abortion is thriving much to our disgrace.
This is the kind of healthcare Pres. Obama wants. God help are children if they become ill & ou seniors. I pray for this family that God in His mercy breaks through this system & tears down the walls that prevents this family from bringing their child home with the care he needs. Unbelievable story.
The health care in canada is one of the best in the world! As is our willingness to take care of our people through public healthcare. I laugh at the americans who try and say that this unfotunate situation does not happen in american Hospitals. It is lies. As is most of the posts made on so called supporters facebook pages. Without the donations that the public has made Not a single hospital in america would even look at this child as his family is poor and lives off our “terrible” system. I say shame on all of you who dont know how or why our system works so well. I challenge you all to do a little reshearch and actually learn about what is really happening rather than believe obscure posts on facebook placed by groups who are serving their own agenda and placing this familys interests last!!
did you know the hospital wanted to do a trac. in november and the parents refused? Right from the begining the parents seem to have done the opposite from what a highly accredited hospital has advised. I feel for their pain but this media whoring and the lies they allow their advocates to tell are vile!
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