Family fights hospital over brain-dead boy

Source: Agencies  |   2008-11-9  |     NEWSPAPER EDITION

A US hospital has asked a judge for permission to stop treating a brain-dead 12-year-old cancer patient, even though his ultra-religious New York parents want to keep him on life support.

Motl Brody of Brooklyn was pronounced dead last week after a half-year fight against a brain tumor, and doctors at Children's National Medical Center in Washington say the seventh-grader's brain has ceased functioning entirely.

But for the past few days, a machine has continued to inflate and deflate his lungs. As of late Friday afternoon, his heart was still beating with the help of a cocktail of intravenous drugs and adrenaline.

That heartbeat has prompted Motl's parents, who are Orthodox Jews, to refuse the hospital's request to remove all artificial life support.

Under some interpretations of Jewish religious law, including the one accepted by the family's Hasidic sect, death occurs only when the heart and lungs stop functioning.

That means Motl "is alive, and his family has a religious obligation to secure all necessary and appropriate medical treatment to keep him alive," the family's attorney wrote in a court filing last week.

The family has asked the hospital to leave the breathing machine on and keep administering drugs until the boy's heart and lungs no longer respond.

Motl's condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.