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And now doctors cut a poor black woman who was awake and alert and who had said "please don't do this until my mother gets here" off her ventilator, against her wishes, without even giving her an extra day or two for her mother to get in from Africa, don't even bother to sedate her first, and...

...nothing.

No outrage, no protests, no angry letters to government, no death threats against the doctors who ignored the patient's wishes, no hue and cry from the very Republican and supposedly pro-life government of the state in which this was allowed to happen.

Nothing.

You'd think there'd be some pro-life outrage by now, wouldn't you? It should be all over the front pages of the sites I linked, wouldn't you think? At the very least, the National Right To Life Foundation, who's still to this day waving the corpse of Terri Schiavo around?

Brent wrote:it's played out...

brembo wrote:Wait, wait wait....

Am I to understand that a hospital pulled the plug on someone that was NOT brain-dead and could communicate in some manner? If she was on a ventilator then she was not talking.

Paft wrote: They pulled the plug on someone that was alive and communicating.

brembo wrote:I find this VERY difficult to believe. Murder. Hypocratic oath. Fear of lawsuit at the minimum. Somewhere something was lost in communication.

thepieman wrote:I'm pretty sure that a person could be totally brain conscious and still require the use of a Ventilator to keep them breathing. ....

Pie

A family has gathered to mourn a woman gone too soon.

Tirhas Habtegiris was an East African immigrant and only 27 when she died Monday afternoon.

She'd been on a respirator at Baylor Regional Medical Center at Plano for 25 days.

"They handed me this letter on December 1st. and they said, we're going to give you 10 days so on the 11th day, we're going to pull it out," said her brother Daniel Salvi.

Salvi was stunned to get this hand-delivered notice invoking a complicated and rarely used Texas law where a doctor is "not obligated to continue" medical treatment "medically inappropriate" when care is not beneficial.

Even though her body was being ravaged by cancer, this family says Tirhas still responded and was conscious. She was waiting one person.

"She wanted to get her mom over here or to get to her mom so she could die in her mom's arms," says her cousin Meri Tesfay.

Ten days was not enough time, they say, to get a mother from Africa to America.

The family and hospital desperately tried to get Tirhas moved to a nursing home but they say no one would take her.

"A fund issue is what I understand. Because she is not insured and that was the major reason the way I understood it," Salvi said.

A statement from Baylor Plano disputes that and says the hospital did its best to comply with the family's wishes in every way.

Still, on the 11th day, Tirhas Habtegiris was taken off the respirator and died.

Her family feels caught in America's health insurance crisis.

"And it's kind of a shock to me too to experience this in this country. It's the richest country in the world. Very sad," Salvi said.

Experts say there are very few charity beds for ventilator dependent patients in this state. President George W. Bush has said he wants to expand healthcare for legal immigrants in this country.

Augustus wrote:it all about money for why they pulled the plug:



But yeah the real question is why wouldnt Bush and Delay do anything to step in? especially their own state texas? When they were all over the florida issue..