{"id":2714,"date":"2006-04-25T11:29:11","date_gmt":"2006-04-25T11:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/the-case-of-andrea-clark.html"},"modified":"2006-04-25T11:29:11","modified_gmt":"2006-04-25T11:29:11","slug":"the-case-of-andrea-clark","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/the-case-of-andrea-clark.html","title":{"rendered":"The case of Andrea Clark"},"content":{"rendered":"

Prolife Blogs tells the story:<\/a><\/p>\n

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A life or death struggle is taking place at St. Luke\u2019s Hospital, where doctors are planning to remove a woman from life support. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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The patient is not brain dead, and according to her family, she wants to live. <\/p>\n

Andrea Clark has been at St. Luke’s since November.
They may be small in number, but the protesters said the bigger picture is the gravity of their message. <\/p>\n

\u201cThey just say, \u2018well she\u2019s miserable.\u2019 Well, to me that\u2019s a quality of life decision that is up to her and her family,\u201d Lanore Dixon said. \u201cThat is not a medical decision.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

By the way, before you get going in the wrong direction, note that St. Luke’s is an Episcopal hospital. <\/p>\n

Thanks to Amy Pawlak for sending it along.<\/a><\/p>\n

Wesley Smith comments<\/a><\/p>\n

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Texas has a terrible law that permits an unelected, self-appointed, anonymous ethics committee to forcibly remove care. Once that happens, the patient has 10 days to find another hospital. These are closed proceedings. I am unaware of any records kept of the evidence presented at the hearings or the deliberations.<\/p>\n

These are life and death decisions and it seems to me that there may be a significant constitutional issue here of immense importance. A law permits private decision-making that will result in death without even the right to a public hearing, to cross examine witnesses, or a formal appeal. Someday, someone is going to attack this statute and its constitutional implementation frontally in federal court. I have already urged some attorneys in private that they do just that. Let us hope that fairness and simple justice prevail. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That Texas law? Signed by then-governor Bush in 1999.<\/a><\/p>\n

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Andrea’s sisters are racing to beat the clock but say the hospital is working against them. Although the obscure 1999 Futile Care Law that gave hospitals the authority to remove patients from life support despite the patient’s and family wishes says once such a decision is made that the hospital must provide the patient’s family with a list of hospitals where the patient could be transferred, St. Luke’s hasn’t done that. The sisters also claim that the hospital social worker exaggerated the seriousness of Andrea’s condition, exaggerating the level of care that is needed in an alleged attempt to discourage other hospitals from admitting her as a patient. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At a guest reader at the Houston Chronicle site, this post just appeared:<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Saturday the family protested in front of St. Lukes. Lanore told me that several families joined them who had previously been urged to discontinue life support for a loved one and did and were sorry that they were talked into it. They wanted the sisters to fight this.<\/p>\n

Andrea is sedated now with pain medication, but when she is not she communicates well to her sister. Lanore said the last time Andrea was awake Lanore read her lips and Andrea said, "I miss you."<\/p>\n

I asked Lanore why she thinks the Doctors decided that Andrea should be taken off life support. She said "You know Andrea has many friends and is part of about a dozen online crochet groups. She loves crafts. But to someone who downhill skis I suppose that doesn’t look too exciting. I think the Doctors think her life sucks."<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2714"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2714\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}