Detroit, Mich., Nov 1, 2019 / 04:56 pm (CNA).- The mother of a Michigan teenager who was recently declared brain dead is asking for prayers and support, after a judge ordered a hospital to continue life support until a Nov. 7 court hearing on her son’s health status.
“We feel that human life doesn’t have an estimable value, and it’s invested with the highest dignity by God…To me, it’s very important that we allow for him to continue fighting,” LaShauna Lowery told CNA in a Nov. 1 interview.
Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Michigan declared Titus Jermaine Cromer Jr., 16, to be brain dead, after two doctors determined that he had suffered “irreversible cessation of all functions of the entire brain, including the brain stem.”
The hospital had made plans to remove his life support systems on Oct. 28, and Cromer’s family challenged the decision, asking for additional medical opinions on whether he is actually brain dead.
Cromer is a junior at University of Detroit Jesuit High School, a Catholic high school in Detroit, Michigan. He was rushed to the hospital Oct. 17 after suffering cardiac arrest. Upon arrival at the hospital he could not breathe independently or regulate his own blood pressure.
After Cromer received hydration, nutrition, and body temperature regulation, his family’s lawyer says he is showing signs of improvement and can now breathe independently and regulate his own blood pressure.
“There are strong indicia that he is getting better everyday,” the family’s lawyer, Jim Rasor, told The Detroit News.
“He is currently able to breathe for short periods on his own. …That’s a dramatic improvement from when he came into the hospital.”
Lowery, who is a Baptist went to a Catholic school when she was young told CNA the family’s Christian faith is in important part of the whole situation.
“We’re Christian, right? What I would say is, in our faith, we believe that when the soul leaves the body is when we’re gone. So I think that we need to allow Titus, to allow for his brain to heal.”
Lowery said the family has received independent guidance that has suggested that for a brain injury like Titus’, it could take between two months and two years for the brain to really see healing.
“Seven days, nine days, right, is not enough time,” she said. “So we really want to be able to give a chance for him to allow for his brain to heal, and to allow for him to fight.”
She cited 1 Corinthians 6:19-20: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.”
While also asking for prayers for Titus’ recovery, she encouraged any other family that is going through a similar situation to reach out to her with offer support and information.
“I didn’t know I had options. I didn’t know I had rights. I didn’t find out about the patients’ rights until it was too late,” she said.
“And so when you’re going through a situation like this, you’re so overwhelmed by all the information that’s being put at you, sometimes it’s hard to digest. So I would say any family that’s going through this— learn your rights, know you have options, and don’t give up.”
Michael Vacca, an attorney and head of bioethics for the Catholic healthcare nonprofit Christ Medicus Foundation, urged Beaumont Hospital to defer to the rights of the parents.
“Despite being declared brain dead, a designation that is imprecise and inconsistent, these physical signs in Titus are objective indications of life,” Vacca said Oct. 30.
Louis Brown, Executive Director of the CMF, called for another medical facility to take Titus on as a patient.
“It is unjust that medical institutions are seeking to end life support so quickly against the wishes of the patient’s family and when patients are showing signs of life,” he said Oct. 30.
The family will go to court Nov. 7, when both sides will present their case so Oakland County Circuit Judge Hala Jarbou can decide what will happen going forward.
In the interim, Lowrey said, the family is looking for facilities that will take Titus and offer him care, both in the Detroit metro area and further afield.
Cromer’s case is similar to that of 14-year-old Bobby Reyes, who was rushed to C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Michigan last month following a severe asthma attack. Repeat tests in the following days indicated that there was no blood flow or electrical activity in the boy’s brain.
The hospital declared Reyes brain dead and made plans to remove him from life support. Reyes’ family fought the decision but ultimately failed to receive relief from a court, due to a jurisdiction dispute. Reyes was removed from life support on Oct. 15.
The hospital said in a statement, “Continuing medical interventions was inappropriate after Bobby had suffered brain death and violates the professional integrity of Michigan Medicine’s clinicians.” Michigan law recognizes an individual as dead if they have undergone “irreversible cessation of all function of the entire brain, including the brain stem.”
The two Michigan cases have drawn renewed attention to the diagnosis of brain death and sparked concerns over parental rights in cases where family members question a diagnosis.
The National Catholic Bioethics Center (NCBC) maintains that cases of improvement over the course of months or years generally indicate an incorrect diagnosis of brain death in the first place.
“Stories of people continuing on a ventilator for months or years after being declared brain dead typically indicate a failure to apply the tests and criteria for determination of brain death with proper attentiveness and rigor,” said Fr. Tad Pacholczyk, director of education for the center, in a 2005 information sheet.
“In other words, somebody is likely to have cut some corners in carrying out the testing and diagnosis.”
In Cromer’s case, the family believes their teenage son has been misdiagnosed. Their lawyer cited his improvements in independent breathing and blood pressure regulation as “very strong indicia that he has not suffered brain death,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
Medical criteria for diagnosing brain death, while controversial in some circles, have been accepted by most Catholic bioethicists, provided that diagnostic tests are carried out thoroughly and carefully.
In an Aug. 29, 2000 address to the international congress of the transplantation society, St. John Paul II stated that using as a criterion for death “the complete and irreversible cessation of all brain activity (in the cerebrum, cerebellum and brain stem) … if rigorously applied, does not seem to conflict with the essential elements of a sound anthropology.”
The NCBC has also stated repeatedly that “Health care workers can use these neurological criteria as the basis for arriving at ‘moral certainty’ that an individual has died.”
The NCBC noted that determining death by these neurological criteria typically involves bedside testing to assess absence of response or reflexes, apnea testing to assess the absence of the ability to breath, and “possible confirmatory tests to further assess the absence of brain activity (for example, an EEG) or the absence of blood flow to the brain.”
Similarly, the U.S. bishops’ Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services indicate that “the determination of death should be made by the physician or competent medical authority in accordance with responsible and commonly accepted scientific criteria.”
And in 2008, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences stated that “brain death … ‘is’ death,” and that “something essential distinguishes brain death from all other types of severe brain dysfunction that encompass alterations of consciousness (for example, coma, vegetative state, and minimally conscious state).”
“If the criteria for brain death are not met, the barrier between life and death is not crossed, no matter how severe and irreversible a brain injury may be,” the academy added.
The Pontifical Academy of Sciences said that after brain death, “the ventilator and not the individual, artificially maintains the appearance of vitality of the body. Thus, in a condition of brain death, the so-called life of the parts of the body is ‘artificial life’ and not natural life. In essence, an artificial instrument has become the principal cause of such a non-natural ‘life’. In this way, death is camouflaged or masked by the use of the artificial instrument.”
Still, some pro-life advocates question the medical criteria used for diagnosing brain death and argue that taking organs from individuals diagnosed as brain dead amounts to homicide.
The NCBC rejects that stance as “irresponsible” and “in tension with Catholic teaching,” countering that while a body may appear to be alive due to oxygenated blood being mechanically pumped through the body, thorough and rigorous testing can confirm that an individual is truly dead.
Dr. Alan Shwemon, former chief of the neurology department at Olive View-U.C.L.A. Medical Center, is an outspoken critic of the criteria used to diagnose brain death.
Shewmon had diagnosed some 200 patients as being brain dead throughout this career, according to the New Yorker. But he began to have doubts about the condition, which were intensified when he saw the case of a 13-year-old girl in Oakland who had been declared brain dead but began to show signs of improvement after being given tube feeding and hormone replacement.
Over the next four years, the girl was able to respond to simple motor commands and underwent puberty-related physical developments before dying of unrelated conditions, Shewmon said. His analysis of the situation led him to believe that the girl had not been brain dead, but was instead in a “minimally conscious state,” with brain flow in the brain too low to be detected by imaging technology, yet sufficient to prevent the death of brain cells – a condition known as global ischemic penumbra.
“Her case challenges the claimed infallibility of diagnostic criteria for brain death and supports the hypothesis that global ischemic penumbra can mimic both clinical brain death as well as absent blood flow on radionuclide scans,” Shewmon asserted in a December 2018 article.
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Hoooooo-EEEEEEEEEEEY!
We need to ask the Holy Spirit to give those justices courage, wisdom and clarity of vision.
But at least now we see there’s a chance.
We need to be prepared, to steel ourselves. Because soon we will be getting a glimpse of satan’s minions like few in history ever see.
We have to pray, pray, PRAY!
It’s going to be vividly and purposefully and dramatically evil.
The left will do their best to destroy our country — far moreso even than usual.
They will try to intimidate us by burning and looting and killing. Recall what they did a few years ago during the George Floyd riots.
Only back then they were trying to convince us that killing black people was wrong, that “black lives matter”
Now they will be doing it in order to preserve the right to destroy black lives — indeed, *all* lives — by the millions.
I pray the evil they perpetrate will further differentiate the Democratic Party from all human decency and good sense.
And I pray that American Catholics will finally, finally, FINALLY take courage and start voting their faith.
Holy Spirit, save us!
Praying that the good Catholics (Biden and Pelosi) don’t influence the courts to keep the legalization of murdering humans the law of the land.
Biden has asked for Roe to be codified. Will the Pope excommunicate him? He is not neutral, he shouts from the rooftops, but apparently he is a good Catholic
Everyone started out at the end of a lifeline.
This must be our refrain in the ugly and violent days ahead: the Democratic Party is the party of hatred and death. its power is derived, not from right ideas or virtue or decency; it is derived from fists and guns and bombs, and it is aimed at anyone who stands in their way.
Read the draft document. It demolishes Roe and the worn out, lame arguments typically advanced by advocates of “legal” baby murder.
“It’s impossible to overstate the earthquake this will cause inside the Court, in terms of the destruction of trust among the Justices and staff…”
This is the least of the “earthquakes” and does not begin to match the “destruction of trust” that has deformed and even aborted our entire culture for half a century. Mother’s deceived into believing that their pre-born infant was simply part of their own bodies…
Across the board, two generations will have to be weaned from the Big Lie—in all of its forms. Two generations as well as the one upcoming will have to be undeceived—by both the actual reality, and from the trust-busting (!) former court’s 1973 incantations of untruth so much in step with the so-called Sexual Revolution of 1968.
As with the very similar Galileo who inspected reality through a telescope, now the awakened court and society with ultrasound: “Eppur se muove” (Nevertheless, “it” moves).
The shock troops of the Democratic Party are already massing.
Through this upcoming terrible time of turmoil, our refrain needs to be:
See? The Democratic Party is the party of destruction and death.
Their power is not derived from right ideas or virtue or a commitment to freedom.
It flows from from guns and fists and fire.
From intimidation and fear.
Catholics need to open their eyes.
Keep praying. This could change in the next couple of months.
A great turn in favor of life, now threatened by disclosure, an unethical perhaps illegal disclosure to the media, Politico. Disclosure prior to ratification on this most antagonistic issue will likely have widespread repercussions, violence, unlawful protests directed at members of the SC Judiciary.
Schumer is already spewing false allegations fomenting alarm and hatred. Hatred for justice, and inevitably Catholicism. He vows to fight justice itself, alleging that the justices in favor of overturning Roe are “extremists”. If we are in favor of life, we’re now extremists. Couple that with the newly founded Ministry of Truth by abortion purveyor extraordinaire Pres Biden.
While this, for the present [the alleged decision hasn’t been ratified] is wonderful for the protection of a right to life, the fight for true liberty, freedom of speech – the battle for truth and goodness has begun. America as envisioned by the founding fathers is imperiled. We’ll be tested.
Catholic President Biden’s response could have been penned only by Satan’s minions:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-reacts-to-apparent-draft-supreme-court-opinion-on-abortion/ar-AAWSrjV?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=581dc640673148f69fdcece6a5cc3a95
That Francis purportedly claimed Biden was a good Catholic and that he should continue to receive Communion are also words straight from Hell.
The question must be asked – WHO leaked this? I for one would not be surprised in the least were it to be a pro-choice advocate in order to give the abortionists plenty of time to get the troops all set and ready to go when it is made official. In fact I would tend to believe that that is how it came about. Will we find out?
The next few months – and past that – will be brutal.
I am reminded of that old union rally song – “Which side are You On?”
50 People are sitting in front of the court with candles? Really? Why? To mourn the loss of their ability to murder some babies? An article today by Dick Morris says that the court decision will do little to change abortion reality, and he is correct. The decision will be thrown back to the states, so abortion will NOT be banned across the country. Some states will ban it but just as many will let it remain legal. Woman wanting an abortion who live in a banned state will simply have to travel to a state where it is legal. As Morris says, there will be plenty of donated money to “help” these women by buying them bus, train or plane tickets. Pro-lifers MUST be certain to vote in November, as radical extreme actions by the DEMs are certain to take place as they use this red herring of an abortion ban to whip up their crazed base. As for the person who leaked this story ( assuming it is not fake like so many other news stories used by the left to attack the right) , THAT person should be found and jailed.If we cannot trust in the security of our major institutions, we have a big problem and a strong example needs to be made. Leaking govt information, whether real or fake, causes immense civic turmoil and often violence. As for Biden, his disgusting statement should be brought to the attention of the Bishops in his diocese and to the Pope, who seems to think he is such a great guy. I saw one of his minions on TV today STRESSING that Biden is a “devout” Catholic. Its just disgusting they are letting him get away with this act.
The only thing that motivates traditionalist catholics in america is their fervor over abortion. If they don’t have that, what faith do they have left? What brings them together? You can only get angry at gay people for so long.
Are you capable to any words of truth on this topic? Regardless, how about this ultra-right-wing, traditionalist ranting?
Darned CDF!
The real fervor over abortion comes from the Left; the principled stand for life comes from all those who actually acknowledge reason, facts, science, and natural law.
Well, what “brings them together” in my parish is daily Mass and the Eucharist. These are the folks who will go out in a blizzard to help a neighbor,care for a sick friend, run the food banks,raise money to help others through the Knights of Columbus. They are the ones who volunteer to help with the RCIA programs for months on end,and the bereavement ministry to help the grieving through the funerals of loved ones. They are the ones taking up collections of clothing and baby supplies for unwed mothers.They were the ones who came to church during covid to help as EM’s, servers,and lectors, musicians, making Mass as normal as possible in an abnormal time, while others were too fearful to do so. The ones praying for women who feel the need to investigate abortion clinics, which by policy, NEVER mention alternatives. I attend daily Mass. Nobody there HATES anybody. Some in fact, even have gay family members and friends themselves, for whom they pray. If they are distressed at anything, it is the occasional failure of church authorities to stand up for church teachings which have been held valid for thousands of year. Being “nice” should not trump the word of God. Hate however, does NOT enter into this. You should come into our world once in a while. You might be enlightened about who we really are.
I totally object to the release of this article based on a stolen document which was released without official consent of the Supreme Court. This all hearsay until official. In the name of civility and for the sake of the nation cancel it now.
So…a news outlet shouldn’t carry news? Interesting perspective.
I think JT may be referring to journalistic responses to the Hunter Biden laptop disclosures, and so speaking ironically. But who knows?
The principle established at the Nuremberg Trials must be enforced in all 50 states: No state has the authority to legalize the murder of innocent humanity.
There were defendants at the Nuremberg Trials who demonstrated that they had done nothing illegal under Nazi law who were hanged anyway. Why? Murder is intrinsically illegal and can’t be made legal. This is why prosecutors at the Nuremberg Trials treated “legal” abortion as a crime against humanity.
This is surely a battle with the one Christ called “The father of lies” and a “murderer from the beginning.” Our engagement in it, or lack of engagement, will reveal our concern, or lack of it, for Christ in the least of His brethren, which, according to Christ in Matthew 25, will determine where we spend eternity.
We must never forget that God became a child in the womb, and that every baby murdered is someone God has loved from all eternity. There is no nine month gap in God’s eternal love for each of us. Every one of those murders was a catastrophe.
Now is the time for God’s people to respond in a manner commensurate with the urgency of the situation, or one day hear the dreadful words of Christ addressed to them: “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.”
Some are called to prayerful activism. Some are called to prayer alone. All are called by God to respond to the greatest holocaust of innocent human life in the history of the world. Discern His will and carry it out with all your might.