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| Cassandra Fortin's mother |
The parents fail to exhibit a rudimentary understanding of medicine. As a result the parents failed to provide for the necessary needs of the child.
This is considered medical neglect.
The girl, being under the age of 18 years, falls under the auspices of the state.
I am waiting to see how the child welfare case plays out in court as the parents can face termination of parental rights.
Connecticut Teen With Curable Cancer Must Continue Chemo: Court
A 17-year-old Connecticut girl with a highly curable cancer is not mentally competent to make her own medical decisions and will continue to receive the chemotherapy treatments she's battled to halt, the Connecticut Supreme Court ordered Thursday.
Chief Justice Chase T.
Rogers ruled that the teen — listed only as Cassandra C. in legal
records — is not mature by any standard.
That means Cassandra
will remain at a Hartford hospital, in the temporary custody of
child-welfare workers, and will receive her full course of chemotherapy
to treat Hodgkin lymphoma. Doctors have said her odds at recovery are 80
to 85 percent with chemo, but that she will die without it.
Cassandra,
diagnosed in September, had sought to avoid chemo treatments because
she views the medicine as "poison." Her mother, Jackie Fortin, has said
she support's her daughter's decision.
But recent behaviors and
actions by Cassandra's mother — including several skipped oncology
appointments and exams — were cited by state lawyers Thursday as they
asserted the teen is too immature to make life-altering decisions.
"The mother took the
front seat on this," John E. Tucker, assistant Connecticut attorney
general, testified before the panel. "She (Fortin) didn't bring her to
the first medical appointment.
"The child was very
quiet, did not engage in conversations during the medical appointments.
And for a 17-year-old, as you can imagine, that's a little bit unusual,"
Tucker added. "Really, the mother did all of the talking and sort of
the fighting with the medical personnel. And so, really, the child
stands in the shadow of her mother here. She's not an independent
decision maker.
"It was really the mother driving the bus."
In an interview Wednesday with NBC News, Fortin denied pressuring her daughter into her decision to forgo chemo.
"I am not coercing her at all and that is what this is about, what they think I am doing," Fortin said.
Cassandra simply does not want to be infused with "toxic" chemicals, Fortin added.
"My daughter does not
want poison in her body. This is her constitutional right as a human
being," Fortin told NBC News. "She is almost 18. [Her birthday is nine
months away]. If she was 18, I don't think this would be an issue. She
is not 10. She is over 17. She is very bright, very smart."
To that point, Fortin's
attorney, Michael Taylor, argued before the panel Thursday that
Connecticut laws allow teens under age 18 to drive and to donate blood.
And when it comes to a
minor's ability to make decisions about their own bodies, Taylor argued
that both Connecticut courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have previously
ruled that a person's right to "common-law bodily integrity is a
fundamental right," and that right "exists in the minor the same as it
could in an adult."
What's more, if
Cassandra is found to have reached an adult level of maturity, that
should preclude state child-welfare workers from retaining temporary
custody of the 17-year-old and allow the girl to make her own medical
decisions, Taylor argued.
"If a person is
sufficiently mature, if Cassandra is sufficiently mature, then that
state interest evaporates. Her fundamental right remains. … Then, the
state has no interest in undermining her fundamental rights," Taylor
said.
After Cassandra was
removed from her mother's home in December by state child-welfare
workers, she was admitted to Connecticut Children's Medical Center
(CCMC) in Hartford. The teen's cell phone was taken away and hospital
staff pulled the land line out of her room, blocking communication
between daughter and mother, court records show.
Since early December,
she's been undergoing chemotherapy. Assistant attorney general Tucker
told the panel "the child is doing remarkably well" amid those
treatments.
"And I would note that
the child is mid-treatment here," Tucker said. "To interrupt that
treatment would be devastating, even more devastating than delaying the
treatment in the initial instance."
Starting, stopping and
then, later, re-starting chemotherapy for Hodgkin lymphoma can transform
the disease from a highly curable illness to far more lethal disease,
Dr. Mitchell Smith, director of the lymphoid malignancy program at the
Cleveland Clinic, told NBC News.
"If she's been in the
middle of treatment and then stops and then the disease comes back,
that's harder because a lot of times what (cancer) cells that will then
come back are now resistant to the chemotherapy," Smith said. (He is not
involved in Cassandra's care).
"Then you're talking
about, if you want to cure the disease, you have to go through stem-cell
transplant," Smith said. "You (would then) have to go through even more
intense treatment with more risks to try to get rid of it."
Bioethicist Arthur Caplan believes Cassandra, at 17, should not have the right to make a life-and-death medical decision.
"The primary goal in this case is to save a young life," Caplan wrote in an essay for NBCNews.com. "This
is a disease where medicine can do that. Admittedly, the treatment
sucks, but it works ..." Caplan is founding head of the division of
bioethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
"Respecting choice is important," Caplan wrote. "Not burying a young teenage girl who would have lived is far more important.
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