Baby Joseph saved from removal of life support
My friend, Nicole Lau, tipped me off to this story. Baby Joseph, who was to have life support removed today at 10 am (ironic that it is Family Day in Ontario) after being diagnosed with severe neurological issues, has been given more time on his ventilator. Lifesitenews has the story.
One-year-old Joseph Maraachli of Windsor, Ontario, who was to have his life support removed Monday at 10 am. against his parents’ wishes, will now not die on the day that Ontario residents celebrate as Family Day. A hustle by pro-life and anti-euthanasia groups resulted in a change in legal counsel, which has led to at least a temporary stay of removal of the child’s ventilator……
In a statement released today, London Health Sciences Centre said it has received a request from a Michigan hospital “to review Baby Joseph Maraachli’s medical information regarding the feasibility and appropriateness of a potential patient transfer.”
“Our focus at this time is to work with the family on a patient care plan and to continue to provide compassionate and dignified care and comfort to Baby Joseph,” said the statement.
The Superior Court was no help to the parents either:
But in January, the Consent and Capacity Board of Ontario sided with the hospital, and a date for removing Joseph’s respirator was set. The family was able to hold it off by filing an appeal with the Superior Court.
Superior Court Justice Helen Rady also sided with the hospital, saying that Joseph is in a permanent vegetative state with no brain stem reflex. However, Joseph’s family members have said that the boy still responds to stimuli.
It is sad that parents have to fight so hard to have their children be with them, even if it will be for a short time. Please do read the rest of the article and join the facebook group in support of Baby Joseph.
My name is Sam N. Sansalone and I am posting this comment in response to the spurious comment above left by a fake “Sam Sansalone”. Understand that the comment in issue above, beginning with the words “You stupid little fools…”, was not written by myself. It was written by an impostor who was obviously seeking to tarnish my name and confuse people. This kind of impostor-based misrepresentation of me was being perpetrated systematically at other websites in addition to yours. I am surprised that your website allowed this spurious activity by not having an effective moderating system that would have weeded out such impostors or Internet trolls before you allow such comments to be visible to the public, and especially before you (Danny Ricci) was gullibly permitted to write an editorial based on the completely spurious comment.
Your moderating failures aside, for the record: I am very pro-life and I was appointed by the Maraachli family on 20 February 2011 to lead the effort that successfully rescued baby Joseph Maraachli from the would-be fate that the London, Ontario hospital had planned for him. I remained in the leadership position of that rescue mission until Dr. Paul Byrne of Ohio and I successfully secured the Cardinal Glennon hospital opportunity as a facility to receive Joseph Maraachli for treatment so that he could return home with a trache and no ventilator.
Danny Ricci and the University of Toronto Students for Life now have some correcting to do.
Thanks Sam for your post. Please accept my apologies as I should have done more due diligence on obtaining my information. I deleted my one post and the spurious comment above. If you would like to write a guest post for the blog about your efforts I would love to post it.
Again, my sincere apologies and I commend you on your heroic efforts with the Baby Joseph case. The pro-life movement needs more like you.
Thanks, Danny, for the correction. I think the Internet is going to become a trickier and harder place to keep up with troll types, so best wishes to bloggers who have to deal with spurious commenters.
I’d be happy to provide a guest post, but there is so much depth and breadth to the baby Joseph story that it would be difficult to know where best to start. If you have specific questions about any of what happened or the operations in the rescue mission, I’d be happy to provide some details and you could even blog about it if you’d like.
I had a thought, also, about a potential advantage your particular prolife group has by virtue of its U of T affiliation. You see, a significant bit of the “culture of death” around cases like Joseph’s and my daughter’s (Katya Sansalone) has its origins or development in the training of U of T medical students. This is because hospital culture is passed down to the next generation of doctors via the teaching hospitals, and the latter particularly in the Toronto area are a highly influential group that sends these students into careers that span the nation and other nations too. Many influential doctors in North America have had some significant training right there in Toronto, at such hallowed institutions as the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto. Although these facilities do phenomenally good work in most areas, there is a real badness to the inequitable rationing that they in effect often teach to students in the subject matter of disabled infants, for example. So I just had this thought that your U of T prolife group is in a very unique position to dialogue with your fellow students who are being educated as tomorrow’s healthcare providers.
I think you might be able to have a positive influence if not impact on future ‘hospital culture’ trends if you can manage to set up a regular and persuasive dialogue with your fellow students who are among those being groomed into the future influential positions of healthcare administration across North America. If you’d like to talk about this idea I can be reached at 403_678.7921 or sansalone2008@gmail.com. I would think this would be a worthy project and I’d be happy to assist/participate in any way I could.
Best,
Sam N. Sansalone