(LifeSiteNews) — A hospital’s death panel will determine if a baby girl in their care will continue to receive life-sustaining care or die from neglect.
Elaine Wren, born March 10, 2025, is living with an oscillator, a breathing apparatus for infants, in a North Texas hospital. However, her hospital may stop giving her this life-sustaining treatment against her parent’s wishes.
According to the Texas Right to Life, the baby’s parents has turned to them for help. It is calling on the public for “healing for Baby Wren; the hospital to provide the tracheostomy and feeding tube necessary” for her transfer to another hospital; “another medical facility to accept Baby Wren” and “peace and discernment for Wrens family as they advocate for her.”
The Texas Advance Directives Act, also known as the 25-Day Rule, makes withdrawal of life-sustaining care legal. Enshrined into law in 1999, the 25-Day Rule has made it legal for hospital committees to decide to withdraw treatment from their patients for any reason, including a negative assessment of their “quality of life.
According to the Texas Right to 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 25-Day Rule gives the hospital the power to overrule the patient’s wishes.” The patient then has 25 days to find another hospital that will offer him or her the treatment. In some circumstances, this is reduced to 10 days.
The committee ruling in the case of Wren is scheduled to make a decision at a meeting on Wednesday, April 16.
Sadly, the threat to Elaine Wren’s young life is not without precedence. In the United Kingdom, Charlie Gard, Alfie Evans, Indi Gregory, Isaiah Haastrup, and Alta Fixsler are only 5 examples of infants whose parents made unsuccessful court bids to stop hospitals from withdrawing their life-supporting treatment and to transfer the children to hospitals that would treat them. (Tafida Raqeeb, a 5-year-old who suffered a brain injury, is a rare example of a British child who was allowed to live and leave the country for treatment.)
Less well known are American children like the 13-year-old Jahi McMath, who was permitted by courts to continue to receive life support, and Sun Hudson, a little boy born in Houston Texas 2004 with a serious form of dwarfism. The hospital’s death panel determined that Sun could not live very long and gave his mother just 10 days to find another hospital to maintain him on lie support. She failed to do so and, following stays of execution, Sun died of asphyxiation. This is believed to be the first time an American hospital removed someone’s life support without his own advance directive and against the wishes of his guardian.
Developing…