Looks like the hospital legal team is trying to boot this case far, far away, they are offering to transport Andrea to a Ohio hospital if the family decides immediately.
Democratic Underground discussion.
Death by Ethics Committee
We should also note that the Clarke controversy isn't anything like the Terri Schiavo case. Schiavo's tube-supplied food and fluids were ordered withdrawn (supposedly) to carry out her wishes. But Clarke apparently wants to live and her family all agree that she should continue to be sustained. In other words, it is as if Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, agreed to maintain Terri's feeding tube but a hospital ethics committee overruled their decisions and doctors removed the tube anyway.
Hospitals around the country — nobody knows how many — have been quietly promulgating internal rules to permit patients like Andrea Clarke to be denied wanted treatment to maintain their lives. But the legality of internal ethics committees acting as quasi courts to order unilateral treatment refusal remains uncertain in most states.
Texas, however, has become ground zero for futile-care theory thanks to a draconian state law passed in 1999 — of dubious constitutionality, some believe — that explicitly permits a hospital ethics committee to refuse wanted life-sustaining care. Under the Texas Health and Safety Code, if the physician disagrees with a patient's decision to receive treatment, he or she can take it to the hospital ethics committee. A committee hearing is then scheduled, all interested parties explain their positions, and the members deliberate in private.
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