Judge is obviously a militant atheist crushing people's religious freedoms.

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Judge steps in to save sick girl's life
IAN STEWARD

An Auckland girl suffering a rare kidney disease has been put into the guardianship of the High Court because her Jehovah's Witness parents will not consent to her receiving a life-saving kidney and liver transplant.

The 2-year-old girl, whose name and identifying details are suppressed, has had her kidneys removed and is being kept alive by dialysis. Because of her precarious health, she is at risk of infection and doctors believe she needs to have an urgent kidney and liver transplant or she will die from infection.

Jehovah's Witnesses allow transplants but the faith is strict in rejecting the inevitable blood transfusions that would accompany such an operation. They believe blood that leaves the body must be disposed of and not consumed or transfused.

The Auckland District Health Board went to the High Court last month and sought urgent orders placing the girl under the care of the court. A team of doctors including renal, blood, liver and gastroenterology specialists care for the girl.

Justice Helen Winkelmann, who heard the application, said the team agreed the day before the court hearing that "without a liver and kidney transplant M will most likely die from infection within weeks to a couple of months.

"She will most certainly become so unwell within a few weeks that it will not be possible to consider her for a transplant.

"Dr K says that at the moment M is relatively well and a transplant is viable."

The girl was not able to be placed on the organ recipients' waiting list until consent was obtained.

Justice Winkelmann's judgment indicated the parents of the girl were in step with the hospital apart from the one issue of blood transfusion. They accepted the girl needed the transplants to live but were unable to consent to the transfusion.

The Sunday Star-Times understands the girl has had blood transfusions before, given to her by the hospital under emergency provisions in the Care of Children Act. That provision is unable to be used, as the operation is planned and not an unforeseen emergency.

"Dr K says the medical team has worked closely with M's parents to date and she has no doubt that they have acted throughout in M's best interests but the point has come where there is a critical difficulty for the parents, the conflict between their faith, and what the medical needs of their daughter require of them."

Dr K, appearing in support of the application, said the girl would not just need a blood transfusion during the operation but also in the lead-up and possibly after the operation. The doctors estimated that she had a greater than 50 per cent chance of a transplant being successful and, if successful, she would have a normal life expectancy and quality of life.

Ad Feedback Justice Winkelmann ruled that the girl should be placed under the court's care but both her doctors and her parents would be appointed as agents for the court.

The doctors would be in charge of giving consent and treating the girl as they saw fit but her parents would be in charge of all other aspects of their daughter's life.

"By making the orders which are sought, this resolves for M's parents what must be an agonising conflict between their firmly held religious beliefs and the pressing needs of M," the judge said.

Professor of surgery at Otago University, Dr John McCall, said about a quarter of liver transplants were possible without using blood or blood products but the girl's medical team must have determined they would likely be needed.

McCall said he had performed transplants on Jehovah's Witnesses in the past, including surgeries that did not use blood transfusions, but the blood products the patient accepted changed from person to person.

Some Jehovah's Witnesses would accept a bypass, where their own blood was taken out and pumped back into them in a "complete circuit" during surgery. But very few would accept a blood bank system where the person gave their own blood for storage in the weeks leading up to the operation for use during their surgery.

McCall said he had known cases where Jehovah's Witnesses who accepted blood transfusions had been disowned by their parents and church.



http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/7280...ick-girls-life

Unquestionably the right decision, and luckily (I think) this is becoming, or already is, quite standard.

This is where you need secularism to provide trustworthy moral standards and not leave it up to the crazy vagaries of religion.

I don't think that moral standards is the right line to take. Like the parents aren't going to be charged w/ child abuse are they? This is one of those things that just have to come down this way.

btw, what's the JW position on taking the kid back, if anybody knows?

Yeah, little idiosyncrasies like baby killin'.

And if there were a bunch of news articles popping up about eskimo infanticide then we would be just as hard on them. It's absurd you don't realize this.

I just deleted it.

Because it was a custom wiped out less than a century ago when southern cultures invaded them.

But it was a culturally relative activity for the Eskimos. Though most people react against infanticide in a morally absolute way.

Thank God for the sanctity of life concept. Apparently some groups just interpret and apply it differently.

Everyone has a sanctity of life concept. They just draw the rights line at a different point.

I bet a lot of pro-choicers are anti-death penalty. Why is that?

Sanctity of life. Life is important and has deep significance.

Not really

Source?

Putting your apologism for infanticide to one side for the moment, do you agree or disagree with the court's ruling?

Also this, anyone?

I dunno if the OP title was a newspaper headline or what, but I very much doubt it was a plot, or was "foiled" by the court, or was anything to do with murder
Why couch it in such dramatic terms?

Well I initially found out about the Eskimos from an essay by Francis J. Beckwith in which he explains everyone holds some moral absolutes.

Though I think people must engage in some form of moral relativism from time to time. It seems it's almost impossible not to.

It could be a mistake to see moral absolutes and moral relativism as opposing one another when they may work together in elaborate ways people don't fully understand.

I was looking at wiki right after I posted and was going to delete the example because it appeared contradictory but what it really shows is how the southern absolutist thinking redirected the cultural relativism of the Eskimos.

Aren't most people against infanticide? Shouldn't it be a universal absolute if it isn't in certain parts of the world?

This could help demonstrate theistic evolution. If people were apes and apes kill the young and cannibalize other apes then isn't God right in correcting them out of those behaviors via religion? Some societies today are more primitive than others. Why couldn't God have raised the Shemites first as an example to help lead in the civilizing of the world? Look at asdf's African cannibalism article. Isn't that the response of a primitive society more than the response of modern Western Christians?

Going to rearrange your post to make it easier to respond to.

Yeah from what I can see it's pretty inconclusive and the indications are that infanticide happened in life-or-death situations where the whole family was at risk of starvation etc.

I fear you might elaborate and ruin it, but I actually agree with this.

I would agree that infanticide is morally wrong but, for example, ritual child sacrifice to appease an angry God is much worse than abandoning a child in order to save the rest of the family. This is the same thing that came up last week with cannibalism. There is a clear difference between the cannibalism of Jeffrey Dahmer and the cannibalism of the Donner Party. I didn't want to score cheap points off you last week by bringing them up, but since you are talking about moral relativism and absolutism, would you agree that Aztec child sacrifice to their gods is worse than the Christians of the Donner party resorting to cannibalism of the dead in their desperation and starvation?

The main problem with this and the cannibalism argument is that while some 'evil' practices are dying out in some loose correlation with the spread of Christianity other 'evil' practice plainly aren't. In fact, most Christians seem to believe that the world is getting more evil by the day, which undermines the point you are trying to make.

Lastly, please stop asking lots of questions in single posts; it makes it difficult to respond sensibly, especially when so many of your questions are completely open-ended e.g.

You ask questions of this sort constantly. The god you believe in is omnipotent so he COULD do anything (if he existed) so that sort of question doesn't have any good answer. It's not thought-provoking or useful as one can list endless possibilities:

"Couldn't Stalin have been secretly a Christian?"
"Is it impossible that the Bible was written by the Devil?"
"Could the Pope be a shape-shifting reptilian from another dimension?"

The key to presenting a good argument is to provide plausible or provable arguments. This style of argument you use where you post endless questions seems like a weird version of the Gish Gallop

...

I think you are over-thinking this. You surely agree that, in principle, two acts can both be wrong but one is more wrong than the other? Or that the intent behind an action can determine whether or not the act is immoral? I mean, I KNOW you believe this because you criticize the genocide Stalin committed while you defend the genocide the Israelites committed.

This seems like having your cake an eating it. If one evil action decreases over time you credit God while if another increases you blame mankind/Satan.

I don't care that much, it's just bad evangelising. It's not in my interest that you improve your rhetorical skills.

Actually it is in your interest.

Damn those atheists again!!! Stopping God's will!! How dare you! If God wants her dead then who are you to intervene?

Splendour,

I don't have an opinion one way or the other on it.

I haven't thought enough about it and I don't know enough about what motivates this particular JW belief.

On the surface it appears very wrong but like I said I don't know their reasoning behind this belief.

I can tell you why most people are anti-death penalty.

Declaration of Independence --> UDHR --> Amnesty International --> most of the world abolishes death penalty

Life was a lot, lot less important before the end of ww2 (UDHR), and before Enlightenment, it was even less important.
EDIT: Right to life is mentioned in UDHR and in Declaration of Independence, Amnesty International campaigned against death penalty.

Hmmm...I think people may be less in touch with reality today in the West or in the disciplinary sciences than they were a hundred or two hundred years ago because death appears further away or more controllable. But I think that's an illusion that undermines people in all sorts of ways in their thinking about the great questions of life and meaning, etc.

Beckwith said in one of his essays that the main difference between a pro-choicer and a pro-lifer is the point at which people see the person as having a right to life.

Since a lot of biblically educated people think life starts and ends with God they see the fetus as having viable rights whereas other people think the woman's right to her own body govern things.

It all sort of depends on how you view the start and ending point of the human lifeline on how you will come down on your abortion opinions.

The death penalty is a different question though. Iirc, God gives the government the power to apply the death penalty...at least that's how I interpret the bible and I think that's because it's one thing to kill someone innocent and quite another to kill certain types of criminals. Also the tendency to criminality can be partly inheritable in certain cases. Most people don't know that. You have to have done cross studies in sociology, psychology and medicine to be aware of things like that.

Sry for derail.

I can understand how these parents could think like that, but life > beliefs. I hope she gets well soon.

EDIT:
I'm pro death penalty too. Hardly met anyone who is, especially a woman.

So...it appears very wrong but there could be some sort of reasoning that makes it okay?

I wouldn't exactly say I'm pro-death penalty but in extreme cases, maybe.