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WHY DO I SUPPORT TEXAS RIGHT TO LIFE IN ITS EFFORTS TO OBTAIN CHANGES IN HB 3074?

Because for the last ten years, Texas Right to Life has been the ONLY organization helping hospitalized patients navigate the transfer process when the hospitals move to withdraw lifesaving treatment from the patients against their will.

Even if a patient is conscious, able to feed himself, walk, or pay for his own care, Texas law authorizes hospitals and physicians to override the medical decisions of a patient and remove care after providing ten days notice.  Such withdrawal and denial of care can and has sped the death of patients and is covered with complete legal immunity for the doctors and hospitals.

While Texas Alliance for Life and Texas Catholic Conference support HB 3037 in its original form, Texas Right to Life is the ONLY advocacy organization that actually helps patients and families find new physicians or different care settings.  Those other two organizations seem to be more concerned with providing legal protection for doctors and hospitals than for the well-being of patients.  Texas Right to Life, on the other hand, has accompanied over one hundred families to the hospital ethics committee meetings at which the fate of their ailing loved one is determined.

Due to TRTL’s direct, hands-on experience in helping infirm and disabled patients, it can speak directly about the shortcomings and misapplications of the statute that passed in 1999 [Section 166.046 of the Texas Health & Safety Code] to which TRTL then agreed since the 1999 law was the best deal that could be negotiated from a room full of people and organizations who overwhelmingly believed that institutional autonomy always trumps patient autonomy.

Although reforms and patient protections are needed either through incremental steps or total repeal of Section 166.046 of the 1999 law, HB 3074 OFFERS NEITHER A STEP FORWARD NOR ANY PATIENT PROTECTIONS.  In fact, HB 3074 offered by Representative Drew Springer (R-Gainesville) further strengthens the hospital committee’s authority by codifying broad circumstances in which food and water can be denied and withdrawn.

I unequivocally believe that food and water, called “artificially administered nutrition and hydration” or “AANH” in HB 3074, should always be provided to the patient unless doing so is physiologically ineffective.  In other words, if the patient’s body can no longer process the AANH or if the fluid is collecting in his abdomen, then there would be no moral obligation or medical reason to continue that treatment or any treatment that is not achieving the intended curative or restorative purpose.

The Texas Catholic Conference in 1991 supported the withdrawal of AANH from comatose patients and I opposed the withdrawal.  In 2004 Saint Pope John Paul II stated his opposition to the withdrawal of AANH in almost the same words I had used 13 years earlier.  Why the Texas Catholic Conference should still be favoring hospitals and doctors over patients 24 years after their 1991 mistake defies comprehension.

However, HB 3074 takes an approach different, hollow approach from that supported by Saint Pope John Paul II, and offers no real patient protections or steps forward toward positive reform of the 1999 Statute.  The exceptions under which AANH can be withdrawn outlined in HB 3074 are built on a quality of life ethic championed by ethicists of the Proportionalism moral theology school condemned by Saint Pope John Paul II in his Encyclical Veritatis Splendor,  and if passed, the bill would not save one single patient from dying of dehydration or starvation.

Francis hands a copy of the bull of indiction of the Holy Year of Mercy to a Vatican official (AP)

Pope Francis has proclaimed a Holy Year of Mercy which begins today.  Let us start the Holy Year by working to change HB 3074 so that it offers more protection for patients who are in danger of death.