Strollerderby : dead child

Parents Say Hospital Took Son's Organs Without Consent

JeanneSager — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:18:00 GMT

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.

Cops End Search for Baby Thrown in Hospital Trash

JeanneSager — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 22:09:00 GMT

I'm still sputtering over this one. A baby is dead, and somehow his little body ended up not in the hospital's morgue but in their trash.

Now he's gone, police have called off a search for his body, and his mother is convinced the hospital is covering something up.

Kalynn Moore says when she gave birth via C-section to her little boy, Bashere Davon Moyd Jr., on Dec. 21, he was breathing and very much alive. She says doctors spent twenty minutes trying to stabilize him before a nurse wrapped him in a blanket and let her hold his dead body (the picture above was taken then, it's the only link she has to the little boy).

The hospital, however, says the baby was stillborn - as in never alive - and that she was drifting in and out of consciousness because of the anesthesia administered to perform the C-section. They initially told Moore that her son was taken to the morgue. When funeral home workers arrived at the hospital on Jan. 2 to pick up little Bashere, he was nowhere to be found. Christ Hospital says his corpse was either consumed by the flames of an incinerator or is lost amid hundreds of tons of garbage. A large portion of that garbage was shipped out via train to a Kentucky landfill.

Police stopped searching today, and closed the case, citing this not as a criminal matter but an "unfortunate incident [that] was the result of procedural deficiencies and human error."

I understand people are human, but how does a mistake of this magnitude happen? How does a baby become trash? And how can this not be considered gross malfeasance?

As mothers giving birth, we trust the hospital to take care of our children - alive and dead. The hippocratic oath calls for healthcare works to first do no harm. Misplacing a medical chart is an accident. Misplacing a baby is failure to act within the guidelines set for medical facilities, the guidelines that earned them that trust. Not only should someone be held criminally liable in this case, but the hospital should be prepared for a civil lawsuit. I hope they lose.

Via Jezebel

Image: MSNBC

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Jersey Dad Fakes His Own Son's Death for Money

JeanneSager — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:32:00 GMT

By all accounts, it was a parental nightmare. Anthony Myers Sr. told a New Jersey life insurance agent he'd lost his seven-year-old son to a fatal asthma attack. Are tears pricking in the corners of your eyes yet?

Don't bother. The boy is now ten and lives in North Carolina with his mother. His dad? Will have to spend five years on probation and likely cough up his own cash.

The elder Myers admitted in court this week to falsifying his son's death in 2006 to get his hands on a $25,000 life insurance policy. He didn't get ahold of the money - investigators caught wind of his lie before any checks were cut. Now the state is pursuing civil penalties of $5,000.

A New Jersey insurance fraud prosecutor told the New Jersey Star Ledger this type of fraud is rare - parents don't usually fake their own kids' deaths. Uh, maybe because it's sick? There's nothing a parent dreads more than the loss of a child; it's against the natural order for a kid to go first.

Last year a New Jersey woman did fake her own death - later posing as her daughter to try to collect the insurance money, but an actual child wasn't involved in the case. Not excusing her actions, either, but it's one thing to pretend YOU are dead. Pretending your kid is dead? That's just playing with karma.

Looks like Myers found out karma always comes back and bites you in the ass.

Image: Hacked Gadgets

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