In brief, Cook Children’s says baby on life support is in ‘vicious cycle of suffering’
Cook Children’s Medical Center argued against a family’s appeal to continue a baby’s life-sustaining care at the Fort Worth hospital in a motion filed Thursday.
Cook Children’s legal brief was filed in response to the family’s argument submitted on Jan. 16 to the Texas Second District Court of Appeals in Fort Worth. The family of 11-month-old Tinslee Lewis is appealing a judge’s decision that would allow Cook Children’s to take Tinslee off life support.
Tinslee’s family contends she still has a chance to get better and that the hospital does not have a right to decide whether she lives or dies.
The hospital says Tinslee has severe health problems that will not improve and continuing her care is causing her unnecessary pain and suffering. Tinslee was born prematurely in February with a rare heart defect called an Ebstein anomaly. She also suffers from a chronic lung disease and severe chronic pulmonary hypertension, and has undergone several complex surgeries.
A legal battle between the family and the hospital broke out in October, when a hospital ethics committee unanimously ruled to remove life-sustaining care for Tinslee. A judge granted Tinslee’s mother, Trinity Lewis, an injunction against the hospital, preventing them from ending Tinslee’s care.
The injunction was extended twice. In December, Texas Fourth District Court of Appeals Chief Justice Sandee B. Marion heard arguments from both sides before ruling in favor of the hospital on Jan. 2.
The Second Appellate District court will review the hospital’s argument and the family’s written appeal and decide whether to call a hearing in the case. Judges may make a decision based off the written arguments.
Cook Children’s arguments
Cook Children’s argued in the brief that Tinslee “is in an endless, vicious cycle of suffering.” They describe “dying events” in which Tinslee’s ventilator stops working when she cries or gets upset. Staff have to manually inflate her lungs, which is painful.
To minimize those events, Tinslee is sedated and paralyzed.
“She cannot move,” the brief says. “She cannot cuddle. She is rarely, if ever, held. The physician who has been treating her since birth has never seen her smile.”
For the nurses caring for Tinslee, performing care they believe is only hurting the baby causes “moral distress,” the brief says, and causes them to break their Hippocratic oath to “do no harm.”
Forcing physicians and nurses to continue caring for Tinslee when they believe treatment is morally wrong violates their own rights of conscience, the brief argues.
Cook Children’s reached out to other hospitals across the country to try and transfer Tinslee, but they all declined to take over her care.
Joe Nixon, the Lewis’ family lawyer, has argued the law Cook Children’s is invoking to take Tinslee off life support is unconstitutional. Section 166.046 of the Texas Advance Directives Act allows an ethics committee to choose to end treatment if doctors determine care is futile or medically inappropriate.
However, Cook Children’s says the law is a necessary way for patients and doctors to resolve disagreements over a patient’s care.
While Nixon says the law violates Tinslee’s right to life and due process, Cook Children’s disagrees. In the brief, the hospital argued when artificial life support is withdrawn, it is a patient’s diseases that cause death, not the hospital’s removal of life support.
In regards to due process, this constitutional clause only applies to government entities, the brief says. Cook Children’s is a private hospital.
“Appellants’ misguided constitutional claims ask the State to become far more involved in private disputes, eliminating — as a matter of constitutional law — physicians’ and nurses’ rights of conscience,” the brief states.
