UPDATE: 2 year old Blaire Bravenec went to heaven on June 29, 2019. Please keep her family in your prayers.
Original post:
Blaire Bravenec is 2 years old. She’s on life support at Children’s Medical Center in Dallas due to an accidental drowning. CMC is going to disconnect her and let her die TOMORROW if no one steps up to stop them. This should be illegal but its not. Texas law gives life-and-death powers to hospitals regardless of what the families want.
There is a GoFundMe set up for Blaire. To Donate Click here
Blaire’s family is asking for help from an attorney who can stop this tragedy.
What is the Texas 10-Day-Law and who is at risk?
by Texas Right to Life
Under current Texas law, the Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA, Chapter 166.046 of the Texas Health and Safety Code ) threatens the Right to Life of every Texan. The statute, known as the 10-Day-Law, is an immediate threat to vulnerable hospital patients. However, any one of us or our loved ones could fall ill or suffer an accident that renders us a hospitalized patient dependent on life-sustaining treatment. In such a tragic situation, who has the right to decide if you live or die?
Under the reign of the anti-Life 10-Day-Law, enacted in 1999, a partial hospital committee has the power to decide to withdraw treatment for any reason, including the subjective anti-life assessment of “quality of life.” The hospital can then remove treatment, even life-sustaining treatment (ventilator, dialysis, etc.), and the patient cannot appeal the decision. Even if the patient is conscious, coherent, and actively requesting the continuation of life-sustaining treatment, the 10-Day-Law gives the hospital the power to overrule the patient’s wishes. The alarming provisions under the 10-Day-Law have been accurately described by people across the political spectrum as “death panels.” The patient and his or her legal surrogate have a mere 10 days to arrange an emergency transfer to another facility that would be willing to continue treatment. Such a transfer is often extraordinarily complicated in such cases, and there are no practical means under the 10-Day-Law for a typical patient to stop the ticking clock on their own.
Many Texans never learn of this anti-Life statute until they are given notice that the 10-day clock has started for them or a loved one. In that terrifying circumstance, patients and their families, already faced with serious illness, must navigate this draconian law in a fight to survive. Texas Right to Life knows this well through acting as patient advocates. Over a hundred families have contacted Texas Right to Life for guidance and support in the battle against the rulings of hospital bureaucracy sanctioned by an unjust law.
In Texas, hospitals do not even need the courts to grant them this power as the anti-Life law has already given them the authority over life and death. Infants, children, and hospitalized adults have all been unjustly denied their constitutional right to due process and the Right to Life under the 10-Day-Law. Pro-Life legislators have tried for years to reform the law, and they succeeded in making a first step in the long road to fixing the law in 2015, but political games have killed substantive reforms time and again.
Not The First Time
In 2005, a court gave a Houston hospital the go-ahead to turn off the ventilator keeping baby Sun Hudson alive, over the mother’s objections. In 2017, again with a court’s OK, another Texas hospital cut off life support from 46-year-old Chris Dunn, who was awake and communicative, but descending into organ failure because of pancreatic cancer. His mother pleaded with the judges that the hospital was “trying to play God.” But Texas law gives hospitals that power.
George Pickering’s adult son was on life support in a Texas hospital. Doctors declared him brain dead, but Pickering felt his son squeeze his hand to communicate, and was convinced he could recover. When the hospital started to cut off life support, the father holed up in his son’s room with a handgun to stop the process. “They were moving too fast,” he said. He was arrested and jailed, but when he got out, his son had recovered — a rare outcome.
Hospitals need to back off their authoritarian “we know best” posture and show respect for parents.
It takes longer than 10 days for some patients to recover.
- August 2016 – Nineteen days after her car flipped over, the doctors of 22-year-old Sam Hemming were about to give up on her because she was obviously “brain dead” “with no hope of recovery”. Yet moments before she would likely have died from their withdrawing her care, Sam wiggling her toe. From there, fighting back, she made a tremendous recovery in only weeks. Mental and physical exercise has reprogrammed the undamaged side of her brain! (The only sad part of this story is that Sam still plans on becoming a lawyer! 🙂
- May 2015 – In Des Moines, Iowa as reported by USA Today, “Taylor’s brain sank part way into her spinal canal. No one comes back from that, the doctors told Taylor’s mother, Stacy, and her father, Chuck Hale. Nothing more could be done. Their daughter was brain dead. It was time to make arrangements to take her off life support and discuss organ donation. … Taylor Hale, considered brain dead by science, awoke from her coma. … ” So the staff doctors will harvest organs, cut out the eyes, etc., of living children at the Des Moines Blank Children’s Hospital, hereafter known as Blankity Blank Hospital. See also this, this, this, this, and this.
- Texas’ Tomball Regional where brain dead means not dead.January 2015 – George Pickering, a 27-year old Texan, was pronounced brain dead by doctors at the Tomball Regional Medical Center when his father threatened to shoot himself if anyone disconnected his son from life support. During the standoff with police, the son repeatedly squeezed his father’s hand, and then woke up later that evening, has made a strong recovery, and in April was baptized after converting to Christianity.
- July 2013 – A New York woman who was pronounced ‘brain dead’ by doctors unexpectedly awoke just as her organs were about to be removed for transplant.
- October 2012 – A documentary titled “Pigen der ikke ville dø” (“The girl who refused to die”), aired on Danish TV, telling the story of 19-year-old Carina Melchior, who awoke after doctors declared her “brain dead” and had approached the family about considering donating her organs.
- April 2012 – Doctors declared british teen Stephen Thorpe “brain dead,” telling the father that the boy would never recover from a serious car accident. Despite pressure from the doctors, the father would not consent to allow the boy’s organs to be donated. With the help of other doctors, five weeks later Thorpe left the hospital, having almost completely recovered.
- July 2011 – Madeleine Gauron, a Quebec woman — identified as viable for organ donation after doctors diagnosed her as “brain dead” — surprised her family and physicians when she recovered from a coma, opened her eyes, and began eating.
- May 2011 – An Australian woman declared “brain dead” regained consciousness after family fought for weeks doctor recommendations that her ventilator be shut off.
- February 2008 – 65-year-old Raleane Kupferschmidt was taken home to die after relatives were told by doctors that she was “brain dead” from a massive cerebral hemorrhage. The family had already begun to grieve and plan for her funeral when she suddenly awoke and was rushed back to the hospital.
- March 2008 – In one particularly chilling case, 21-year-old Zack Dunlap, who was declared “brain dead” following an ATV accident, recounted how he remembers hearing doctors discussing harvesting his organs. Zack showed signs of life only moments before he was scheduled to be wheeled into the operating theater to have his organs removed. One of Zack’s relatives provoked the reaction by digging a pocketknife under his fingernail.
- May 2008 – A Virginia family was shocked but relieved when their mother, Val Thomas, woke up after doctors declared her ‘brain dead’. Doctors had not detected brain waves for more than 17 hours, but kept the woman breathing on a respirator. The family was discussing organ donation options for their mother when she suddenly woke up and started speaking to nurses.
- June 2008 – A Parisian whose organs were about to be removed by doctors after he had “died” of a heart attack, revived on the operating table only minutes before doctors were to begin harvesting his organs..
Its time for Texans to stand up and tell our leaders to repeal the Texas Advance Directives Act (TADA, Chapter 166.046 of the Texas Health and Safety Code )Call Governor Abbott at (512) 463-1782 or (512) 463-2000.
Call your elected officials and tell them to step up. Find your elected officials here: https://wrm.capitol.texas.gov/home
We only have a few hours to save Blaire Bravenec. Wouldn’t you want someone to fight if this were your child?