What’s in the water at St. Luke’s Hospital?

It seems that the criteria used by hospitals and courts to allow euthenasia of the patients in their care keeps getting simpler and easier for those who want to “pull the plug”. Via WorldNetDaily today, I read that “[a]n ill woman in Houston could die within days because a hospital ethics committee has voted to take her off life support – this despite the fact the 54-year-old is not in a coma, is not brain dead and wants to go on living, her family says.”

That article mentions a blog reporting on the matter that gets right to the point:

For years I have been warning that bioethicists are getting their ducks in a row to permit them to refuse wanted life sustaining treatment that is removed because it keeps the patient alive, not because it doesn’t provide medical benefit. These are value judgments, not medical determinations.

That’s a good point. The standard for deciding who to let die versus who to treat keeps shifting, and rapidly.
There is more reporting from KHOU in Houston here, with video of the woman’s family. In the KHOU story, they mention another recent case of St. Luke’s hospital’s ethics committee deciding to terminate life support on another one of their patients, which in turn caused me to remember a third such case in roughly the same year coming from St. Luke’s in Houston. That was the case of Sun Hudson, which I wrote about over a year ago here. At the time I was able to interview the attorney for Sun Hudson’s mother and was appalled at the conduct of the judge in the case who sided with St. Luke’s without allowing Sun’s mother to present evidence.

So what’s in the water at St. Luke’s Hospital? I’m sure it is a large facility, and statistically we should expect a certain number of decisions each year regarding termination of life support. But why do I keep hearing about St. Luke’s in the context of wanting to terminate (or euthanize, if you prefer) so many patients in opposition to the wishes of the patients’ families?

Who sits on that ethics committee? I don’t literally want anyone to get a list of names (I’m serious about that — that sort of thing gives the blogosphere a bad name), but I would like to know the professional qualifications and experience of the members making these decisions. Is there anyone out there with the ability to find out? What, exactly, gives these people the ability to know better than family members, and in some cases the patients themselves, about whether one’s life is worth living? The question is not rhetorical; I want to know.

Andrea Clark is scheduled to be removed from life support five days from today.

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