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Delaware Court Allows the Removal of Brain-Damaged 23-year old Woman’s Feeding Tube
By J. Margaret Datiles | January 31, 2008
Delaware Court of Chancery Master Sam Glasscock III issued a ruling January 24, 2008, that could result in the withdrawal of Lauren Marie Richardson’s feeding tube.
Twenty-three year-old Lauren Marie Richardson suffered severe brain damage after a heroine overdose in August 2007. She was kept alive with feeding tubes and a ventilator, and successfully delivered a healthy baby girl in February 2007.
According to Delaware law, if a person does not have a living will or other written healthcare directive, artificial nutrition and hydration may be withdrawn if there is “clear and convincing evidence” that the person would have consented to the withdrawal. Delaware law, verbal testimony from friends and family can be presented as evidence in determining this matter.
In Lauren’s case, the mother, Edith Towers, testified that at the time the Terri Schiavo case was in the news, Lauren said: “Don’t ever leave me hooked up to life support. I would not want that. I think it is horrible. I think that I do not ever want to be kept on life support if doctors say there’s no hope.”
In his ruling, Glasscock awarded guardianship to Edith Towers, and wrote: “All medical evidence supplied by the physicians – by the independent neurologist and by Lauren’s own doctors – is in agreement: Lauren is not in a coma but is in a persistent vegetative state . . . She is unable to communicate or experience consciousness. Her continued existence is dependent upon tube feeding and hydration . . . No improvement in her condition can be expected.”
However, Lauren’s father, Randy Richardson, disagreed with the decision and has filed an appeal.
Randy Richardson said that Lauren was living with him during the time the Terri Schiavo case was in the news, and that she never made a statement declaring that she would not want life support. He also stated that Lauren no longer needs a ventilator to breathe, and has been told that she could be taught to eat. Last week, Randy Richardson and the Delaware Pro-Life Coalition Inc. released a recent video of Lauren, in which she appears to respond and react to her family members and a dog. Richardson asserted that she responds to him, and that he wants to take her home, where she will be cared for and where she can live out what is left of her life with dignity, rather than end her life through a slow starvation process.
Randy Richardson stated on Wednesday: “She’s committed no crime and doesn’t deserve to have this death imposed on her.”
Sean O’Sullivan, “Parents battle over life of brain-damaged daughter,” The News Journal, January 31, 2008.
Additional Reading
Topics: End of Life, In The News |
February 1st, 2008 at 2:47 pm
[...] Maggie Datiles provides more details on the Americans United for Life blog. [...]
February 3rd, 2008 at 2:42 am
It escapes me why the courts do not favor the family member favoring life and who agrees to care for the disabled individual.
I find the theory that one can legally kill someone who is disabled slowly by enforced dehydration and starvation but not by a quick lethal injection or blow to the head. The old active vs. passive or action vs. inaction distinction should have died a century ago when liberal justice Holmes demolished it in his famous “may rest upon his oars, though it is a reprhach to the law that it is so” opinion.
If I’m definitely dead–and both Scripture and science agree that, in Scriptural language “In that hour [of death]their thoughts perish” and “The dead known not any thing”–please donate my organs and body.
I don’t know whether this patient, or Mrs. Schiavo, et al., were really brain dead and in a PVS or not. Ah, htere’s the rub! But, “In favor of life . . .” every presumption is indulged,” per Blackstone. Why not use the “beyond reasonable doubt” test?
Upon seeing an MRI on me, two top experts told my wife and me that I had lost much of my higherbrain functin, could never return to gainful much less professional work, and started talking living wills, nursing homes, etc. Then they realized that this was congenital and I had just tested in the 97th percentile in verbal abilities.
Later, after I uncovered some shocking evidence that displeased some powerful people, I was told that I was suffering dementia, Alzheimers’, etc., and actually committed for 90 days and suspended from law practice for mental defect. The records and evidence will prove gross medical malpractice, fraud upon my expert and the court, denial of effective assistance of counsel, direct conflicts of counsel created by those seeking this, etc., whether anyoe wants to bleieve me or not.
I have known two people, both quite sentient when I knew them, whose parents had been told by doctors that they were brain dead–one’s death certificate was actually signed and issued twice–and pressured by hospitals to “pull the plug” and withdraw life support including hydration and food, but refused to do so.
I used to have a statement from a nurse who related having been compelled to participate in a plug-pulling while the patient, although terminally ill with emphysema, was actually conscious and pleading that they not do this after having been brought out of a coma to have him sign a will to the hospital. The nurse had made an error in another case and was afraid to testify about this when that will was probated.
I am convinced that one client, whose doctor had just said she had four months to live, was given a lethal dose of sedative at her request very shortly after a terrible family fight in her hospital room, and died, but her daughter, my prime client in the situation, does not want to face this.
It was at a State Bar of Texas sponsored continuing education program on Mental Health Law, a field in which I represented and knew a lot of incestuously molested, and suicidal, children, teenagers, and adults, that a prominent local lawyer, son of a former judge, announced that he did not believe in suicide prevention but instead believed in euthanasia, and “forced euthanasia” of all “mental patients.” Does this remind anybody but me of a certain regime against which we won a war?
Anyone who really does not want life support should at least have to sign an Advanced Directive to that effect, with witnesses, etc.
With the death of my designee, the only one of the above-mentioned people who survived pressures to “pull the plug,” I don’t know any eligible person to designate to replace her in a Power of Attorney for Health Care.