Another case is illustrating the horrors still possible in a state which calls itself pro-life, thanks to a sinister 25-day rule allowing patients to be removed from life support without their (or their family’s) consent.
According to Texas Right to Life, Baby Wren suffered complications due to childbirth and now, at one-month-old, is continuing to fight for her life in a North Texas hospital. Wren is breathing with the help of a high-frequency oscillatory ventilator (HFOV), a specialized ventilator used on premature or critically ill babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
Wren’s family allegedly wants to have her transferred to another facility, but she would need a tracheostomy performed and a feeding tube inserted, which her current hospital refuses to do, giving the family very few options. According to her family, Wren is improving regardless, but a committee will soon decide if she will be removed from the ventilator; if the committee says yes, Wren will have just 25 days to live.
Though Texas has made great strides in enacting laws to protect preborn children, the 25-day rule — previously the 10-day rule — puts patients’ lives at risk. Some patients, like Tinslee Lewis and Jose Cobos-Portillo, survived efforts from their doctors to kill them. Others, tragically, did not.
READ: Controversial Texas 10-Day Rule leads pro-life group to release video on facts about ‘brain death’
Bill Costa was awake, responsive, and in no pain when the Texas 10-day rule was implemented. His wife, Eugenia, was told that she had 10 days to either find another facility to take him, or he would have his life support removed. He initially was checked into the hospital with heart complications, which required an examination from a cardiologist. But once the hospital decided he had only a short time left to live, it was determined that treatment was not worth it, and he should be left to die. The hospital committee allegedly invoked the 10-day rule without even speaking to Costa’s doctors first, who reportedly didn’t even show up to the meeting to decide Costa’s fate. He died on June 3, 2021.
In 2023, the 10-day rule was amended, requiring that life support cannot be withdrawn from competent patients, and that hospitals could not make “quality of life” judgments as a reason to withdraw someone’s life support. It also extended the limit to 25 days instead of 10.
While this was an improvement, it clearly still puts vulnerable patients at risk, and allows hospitals and doctors to make arbitrary decisions about who can fight for life — and who should be sentenced to death.
Wren’s family is asking for prayers for their family as they navigate these issues and seek care for their baby.
