NRL News
Page 26
April 2009
Volume 36
Issue 4

Judge Rejects Hospital’s Attempt to
Remove Life Support over Family Objection
By Liz Townsend

Rejecting a New Jersey hospital’s decision to remove a patient’s life support—including a feeding tube, ventilator, and dialysis machine—a judge ruled March 4 in favor of the family’s wishes to continue treatment.

“The decision properly vindicated the right of Mr. Betancourt’s family to choose life,” Burke Balch, director of NRLC’s Powell Center for Medical Ethics, told NRL News. “As the court’s opinion held, ‘the goal of the surrogate decision maker was to determine and effectuate what the patient would want’ which ‘allows the surrogate decision maker to consider the patient’s personal value system.’”

Ruben Betancourt, 73, has been in an unconscious state after complications from surgery on January 22, 2008, at Trinitas Regional Medical Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, according to court documents. After being treated in several facilities, he returned to Trinitas in July with kidney failure.

Doctors at Trinitas diagnosed Betancourt as being in “an unresponsive irreversible vegetative state” and told his family they would be discontinuing all life support. Strongly objecting to their actions and disagreeing with the diagnosis, his daughter, Jacqueline Betancourt, was awarded a temporary restraining order January 23, and dialysis treatments—which the hospital had stopped—resumed.

Judge John F. Malone of the Superior Court of New Jersey heard arguments from both sides in February. Jacqueline Betancourt and her family told the court that Mr. Betancourt responded to stimuli by opening his eyes or turning his head, and that the treatment he is receiving is not painful or harmful.

“The family describes Mr. Betancourt as a strong willed person who would not give up,” Malone wrote in his decision. “It is the opinion of the family members that Mr. Betancourt would want to continue to receive treatment.”

Trinitas officials, however, insisted that the hospital has the right to overrule a family’s decision. They contended that physicians should not be “forced to provide futile medical care when they believe that such treatment is against the standard of care and inhumane,” Judge Malone wrote.

“It should appall everyone that a New Jersey hospital would contend, as it did in this case, that ‘Public interest is served ... by elevating quality of life over longevity,’” said Balch, “and that physicians’ views that a patient should be denied treatment so as to bring about immediate death should prevail ‘even though the course of treatment may be contrary to the wishes of the patient’s family to sustain life.’”

Judge Malone rejected the hospital’s arguments and refused to allow the doctors’ or court’s opinion to trump the family’s and patient’s wishes. Naming Ms. Betancourt as her father’s guardian, Malone ruled that her “application to restrain the defendant from discontinuing or suspending treatment of Mr. Betancourt is granted. The guardian is authorized to make decisions respecting medical treatment.”

Despite the outcome in this case, pro-lifers need to be vigilant when other hospitals and doctors seek to remove lifesaving care from patients. “Tragically, with so many in modern medicine seeking to impose their quality of life ethic so as to discriminate against our family members with disabilities, those of us who adhere to the equality of life ethic must step up our battle in the legislatures and courts just to allow them to live,” said Balch.

For more information on the increasing danger of involuntary euthanasia, read “Will Your Advance Directive Be Followed?” at www.nrlc.org/euthanasia/AdvancedDirectives/ReportRevised2007.pdf