Tag Archives: Baby Joseph Maraachli

Baby Joseph Maraachli goes home

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From here:

Baby Joseph Maraachli was released from SSM Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center and flew back to Canada with his family on Thursday morning.

The infant has a progressive neurological disease and received a tracheotomy on March 21 at the St. Louis hospital.

The tracheotomy, which creates an opening into Joseph’s windpipe through an incision in his neck, was a success, said Dr. Robert Wilmott, Chief of Pediatrics for SSM Cardinal Glennon and Saint Louis University School of Medicine.

“Joseph has been breathing on his own, without the aid of a mechanical ventilator, for more than a week,” Wilmott said. “By providing him with this common palliative procedure, we’ve given Joseph the chance to go home and be with his family after spending so much of his young life in the hospital.”

The London Health Sciences Centre had planned, against the parents wishes, to remove baby Joseph’s breathing tube on February 22nd; this would have caused him to choke to death.

The baby will probably still die of his disease, but he will die at home with parents who love him.

He has been given the gift of life – a short life perhaps, but life, nevertheless: just like the rest of us.

Baby Joseph Maraachli now in St. Louis

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Baby Joseph has been moved to Cardinal Glennon Children’s Medical Center in St. Louis, Missouri where he should receive a tracheotomy this week in the hope that he can be moved into nursing care close to the family’s home in Windsor.

From here:

The London hospital, where Joseph was treated since October, had refused to perform the tracheostomy and sought to remove his ventilator against his parents’ wishes.

Dr. Paul Byrne, a fifty-year veteran in the field of neonatology based in Ohio, however, has said that Joseph should have had a tracheostomy “a long time ago.”  He also insisted that he has never seen a need to remove a child’s ventilator.  “If a baby has a disease process that’s so bad that they’re going to die, then they die on the ventilator anyway,” he explained.

The LHSC continues to denounce the move as being “against medical advice”.

Here is an interview with his father and Fr. Frank Pavone:

[flv:https://www.anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/videos/babyjosephinterview.flv 640 360]

Baby Joseph Maraachli flown to the U.S.

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From here:Add an Image

The baby who was hours from being pulled off life support at his Canadian hospital has been rescued by the national director of Priests for Life and taken to the U.S. for treatment……

Priests for Life says it represents a family of ministries that “reach and enrich every aspect of the pro-life movement,” according to its website. The group has been strong advocates for the boy’s release and critical of his treatment in Canada.

“The medical board overseeing his case is apparently convinced that giving proper care to ‘Baby Joseph’ is futile,” the website reads. “They don’t mean that the medical care won’t help him. They mean his life in its current condition isn’t worth the trouble.”

The LHSC – where baby Joseph was being treated – has its version of the situation:

Despite the strongest possible medical advice to the contrary from medical experts in Canada, the United States and Europe, the parents of Baby Joseph Maraachli have accepted an offer to transfer him by air to the faith-based Cardinal Glennon Children’s Hospital in St. Louis, Missouri.

His parents exercised their legal right to have him discharged after LHSC exhausted all its legal options in attempting to deliver to Baby Joseph the best possible and most appropriate medical care, given the progressive, fatal neurodegenerative disease from which he suffers. An LHSC medical team transported Baby Joseph to London International Airport in the presence of his father.

The private plane carrying Baby Joseph, and any care to be provided in the U.S., will be paid for by U.S.-based interests and not by LHSC. The plane took off from London at approximately 10:20 p.m. on Sunday, March 13, 2011.

“As one of Canada’s top teaching and medical research health care centres, LHSC physicians make their medical judgments in the best interests of every patient, based on experience, fact and scientific evidence. LHSC continues to be proud to stand behind their judgments and the care given to Baby Joseph. The judgments were sound, both medically and ethically, and the care Baby Joseph received from our staff was second to none anywhere in the world,” says LHSC CEO, Bonnie Adamson.

The medical judgments about Baby Joseph made by LHSC physicians remain unchallenged by any credible medical or legal source. Those judgments remain supported by 9 pediatric specialists in Ontario as well as pediatric specialists in the U.S. and Europe, Ontario’s Consent and Capacity Board, and the Superior Court of Ontario, as being in the best interests of Baby Joseph.

The “best possible and most appropriate medical care” that the LHSC wanted to deliver was to remove the baby’s breathing tube, allowing him to die – by choking.

There seems little doubt that, without a miracle, baby Joseph is going to die in the not too distant future: the questions are, how long should his life be prolonged, how will he die, where will he die and who should decide?

The LHSC doctors think they know what is best for baby Joseph, but to judge what is best for a person, when it comes to life and death, is to weigh the worth of a person’s life – something which science is unable to do. That leaves the subjective biases of the doctors which, in this case appear to be dominated by the utilitarian: how much it is costing to keep the baby alive.

Only parents have a natural right to judge what is best for their children: they may not always make the right choice, but it is still theirs to make.

The spectacle of the power struggle over baby Joseph’s fate, in which the doctors of the LHSC are embroiled, has exposed the arrogance that seems to beset many in the medical profession. An expert in a technical field – and that’s all medicine is – is not, by virtue of that, an expert in making moral judgements.

Hospital still threatening to remove baby Joseph’s life support

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This isn’t getting any better:

LONDON, Ontario, February 22, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – While things were looking up for the parents of Joseph Maraachli this past weekend, the picture has now become bleaker. In the latest twist in the case the London hospital where their dying son is being cared for is seeking to remove the parents’ decision-making power after they refused to have him taken off life support. Hospital security is also denying them private visitations.

Alex Schadenberg, executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, which has been offering support to the parents, Moe Maraachli and Sana Nader, says they are now only allowed to see their son with a security guard present.

“They fight my family. … they put security for me.  They never give me private to pray with my son,” Moe told Fox News this afternoon.

“Security watch me and security stay with me,” he added.  “When I go to hospital I feel I am not in Canada.  I feel I’m in jail or they kidnapped my baby.”

“It’s ridiculous.  It’s not like they could pick the child up and take him home.  The baby would die,” said Schadenberg.

Schadenberg said that Moe tried to bring him in to see Joseph on Monday, but security denied him access to the room, and told him to leave the premises.  “It’s become crazy.  The hospital’s going overboard and it makes no sense,” he said.

[flv:https://www.anglicansamizdat.net/wordpress/videos/BabyJoseph.flv 480 360]

The longer it goes on, the more it resembles a Kafkaesque nightmare created by unfeeling hospital apparatchiks.

Baby Joseph Maraachli is not allowed to die at home

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One year old baby Joseph Maraachli is going to die; his parents want him to die at home. In order for that to happen, Joseph needs a tracheotomy to allow him to breath. The hospital refused and will remove his breathing tube Monday, which will cause him to choke to death. The hospital’s reason  for not doing the tracheotomy – which the courts upheld? It could cause infection or pneumonia.

R.I.P. Canadian health care, judicial sanity and baby Joseph.

From here:

With all of their legal avenues exhausted, the family will have to say goodbye to Joseph Monday morning — on Family Day — when his breathing tube will be removed.

“I do my best for my baby. My son is not a criminal . . . to just let him die,” dad Moe Maraachli said through tears.

“They are taking my baby away from me . . . Where is the humanity?”

He said he didn’t know how to break the news to his wife Sana Nader, who was too upset to sit through the day’s court proceedings, or explain to their seven-year-old son Ali what’s going to happen to his little brother.

Maraachli and Nader fought to bring Joseph home to Windsor so he could spend his last days surrounded by loved ones. Joseph suffers from a severe and deteriorating neurological condition that has left him in a persistent vegetative state, according to specialists in London, Ont., who’ve examined him. He’s been at the Victoria Hospital, part of London Health Sciences Centre, since October.

Nine years ago, Maraachli and Nader lost a daughter who suffered from health complications nearly identical to Joseph’s.

Although the couple has accepted their baby boy’s inevitable death, they insisted that it occur peacefully at home and not by removing his breathing tube, which will cause him to choke since he can’t swallow or breathe on his own. The parents asked for a tracheotomy, which would open up a direct airway through an incision in Joseph’s trachea and make it possible to bring the baby home.

But doctors refused to perform the procedure, citing serious risks of infection, pneumonia and other possible complications.