A set of distraught parents say their son should have survived surgery after a snowboarding accident, but he was suffocated by healthcare workers so they could take his organs.
Pretty heady charges, especially for a hospital - you know, the people who take an oath to "first do no harm."
Although there isn't enough information out there to tell whether the hospital is actually guilty of suffocating Gregory Jacobs, the debate over whether the hospital had rights to move in and take his organs is the one parents need to focus on. Jacobs' parents say the hospital moved in to take his organs without their consent. The hospital won't comment on pending litigation.
Should we as parents have the final say?
Parents are understandably devastated after the death of a child - and often in no positition to debate whether they want to turn their child's body over to a doctor with a knife. But after death, time is of the essence. Most organs must be harvested and used within six to seventy-two hours of death. Organs are needed from kids - for kids - because they're the right size for another child's body (think about it, you can't put a 50-year-old man's heart in the body of a sixteen-month-old - the chest is just too darn small), but a significant amount of kids still die because the pediatric population of organ donors is limited.
Our kids are our kids. I can't imagine ANYTHING as bad as losing them, but if it's already happened, I'd like to think I'd have the bigger picture in mind. If I lost my child, I could still save someone else from that same pain.
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