SB 1142 Senate Substitute Elimates Civil Rights in Health Care for Every Virginia Citizen

VIA Charlottesville Prejudice and Civil Rights Watch

B. If there is no individual eligible to make health care decisions in subsection A, the patient’s attending physician shall be authorized to provide, continue, withhold, or withdraw health care without obtaining a court order if such health care decision has been affirmed and documented as being ethically acceptable by the health care facility’s ethics committee, if one exists, or by two physicians who are not currently involved in the treatment of the patient and who did not make the determination that the patient was incapable of making an informed decision.

If you live long enough or even if you are young, you have every chance of being considered incapacitated at some point through accident or illness.  The Senate version of SB 1142, the bill that allows research not for their benefit on incapacitated and dying patients, now has a section added that says that if you have no advanced directive and no willing or available family member to act on your behalf, two doctors or an ethics committee (who are appointed by hospitals and one of which approved the Ashley X treatment out West) to decide to give you care you may not want or to withhold care you would want if you could communicate your wishes.  This bill essentially leaves no Virginia citizen safe from unwanted medical interventions or unwanted withdrawal of medical interventions.

In addition, this bill is clearly aimed at people with psychiatric diagnoses, not people with dementia or Alzheimer’s as some have claimed as no where is dementia mentioned, but “severe and persistent mental illness” is specifically mentioned as a grounds for guardianship and a right for a guardian to admit a person without due process to a psychiatric facility for 10 days with no hearing, no lawyer, no protections against abuse of the law by bad actors at ALL.

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