A family had to flee their home country of Canada to save their son’s life, after doctors threatened to remove his life support and have his organs donated against their will.
Nicolas Tétrault told the Federalist that his son, Arthur, landed in Montreal Children’s Hospital after an accidental drowning. “It’s difficult to always have perfect attention, and we did not,” he said. “We should have, but at that time, we didn’t want to install a fence around the pool on the house that did not belong to us.”
A tragic accident
While having left the house to pick up one of his children from school, Tétrault forgot to close a door, allowing Arthur to have access to the pool, and led to his drowning. Tétrault said Arthur’s body was “almost freezing,” and the doctors began slowly raising Arthur’s temperature, gave him an MRI, and gave him sedatives to prevent seizures. All of this is part of the normal standard of care; once stabilized, the sedatives are weaned and the breathing tube removed to see if the patient is able to breathe on their own.
“When they extubated him three weeks after — just to do a trial to see if he could breathe on his own — our baby was able to breathe on his own successfully for about 18 hours or 12 hours,” Tétrault said.
But they faced another problem: Arthur’s airway had lost its form. Paul Harch, who is currently treating Arthur in the United States, said there is an easy treatment for this: a tracheostomy, which would enable Arthur to breathe on his own. For reasons unknown, doctors chose not to do so.
Substandard care
“They wouldn’t do a tracheostomy, and instead, were keeping him heavily sedated and told the parents, ‘He’ll have no quality of life, he’s going to be a vegetable,’ etc.,” Harch said. “Here he was, heavily sedated in the hospital up there, and they’re telling the parents essentially that he will die and or be vegetative the rest of his life. They can’t make that statement. They don’t really know that for sure.”
Harch also said doctors failed to give Arthur other oxygen treatments frequently used to restore brain function. “It was all about trying to get him in a hyperbaric chamber as soon as possible,” Harch said. “The parents then pulled every possible move, influence, leverage — whatever they could — to try to get their son treated, and even tried to do the very innocuous but potentially helpful ‘normobaric’ oxygen. And they just had extreme resistance from the medical staff.”
Instead, Tétrault said they began pressuring the family to donate his organs. “They were killing him with all these drugs, and they were justifying the fact that they were promoting to harvest the organs and give them away,” he said. “They were talking about it all the time … My wife and I, they brought us in a death squad meeting and they told us basically, Arthur would be unplugged on Nov. 29.”
He explained they were given very little time to adjust to this announcement. “We had 14 days to prepare his funeral and say goodbye to him,” Nicolas Tétrault said. “They were promoting to harvest the organs and give them away.”
Alex Schadenberg, executive director of Canadian nonprofit Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, told the Federalist he wasn’t surprised, as Canada only allows “approved treatments” and that the health care system is already maxed out.
“With the case of Arthur Tétrault, the Montreal physicians refused to try hyperbaric oxygen treatment because it wasn’t listed as an available medical treatment in Canada. What is even more concerning is that the doctors were insisting on withdrawing treatment,” Schadenberg said. “Arthur is fortunate that his father has demanded treatment and that he was willing to send him to Louisiana for treatment providing hope.”
Fleeing to the United States
Just four days before he was scheduled to die, the family was able to get Arthur out of the country. “We were able to bring him to New Orleans at Ochsner Hospital, which was amazing,” Tétrault said.
Once they arrived, Harch said he was shocked to see Arthur’s condition, as the Canadian medical team had presented him as being near dead. “They were led to believe that they were coming to pick up a near-dead child, that this kid had no chance — nothing,” Harch said. “When they got there and saw the condition that he was in, which was not as severe as what had been described, it was an eye-opener that they see why this father and mother went to the extremes they did.”
Arthur is now awake and alert, able to breathe on his own, and is regaining movement in his limbs. And Tétrault says it is the difference in medical care that means the difference between life and death for his son.
“In Quebec, it’s a socialist hospital system where the patients are seen as an expense. In the U.S., a patient is seen as an income, as a client,” he said. “It makes the entire difference in the world.”
The family has started a GoFundMe to raise money for Arthur’s treatment.
Similar stories
Sadly, other families have experienced situations similar to what the Tétrault family is experiencing now, and often without the same positive outcome. This has most frequently happened in the United Kingdom, but even in the United States, families have had to fight for their loved ones’ right to life.
- Indi Gregory died after a judge in the United Kingdom ruled that her life support could be removed, against her parents’ wishes. Indi had a mitochondrial disease, and her parents argued that Indi was disabled, not dying. Italy granted her citizenship and offered her medical care at Vatican City’s Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital, but the UK judge refused to allow Indi to leave, and demanded that her life support be removed. She died on November 13, 2023.
- Charlie Gard was found to have a rare RRM2B mitochondrial depletion syndrome, and his parents raised over $1 million to take him to the United States for treatment. Staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London disagreed that there was any point in giving Charlie treatment, and wanted him taken off of life support instead. The legal battle grew to the point where the European Court of Human Appeals got involved, and ruled against Charlie’s parents. An American doctor, Dr. Michio Hirano, traveled to London to examine Charlie in person, and said his condition was due to muscle weakness; with his treatment, he believed Charlie’s condition could be improved. But, as his parents ultimately admitted, the hospital delayed for so long that Charlie deteriorated to the point of no return. Yet even after his parents agreed to remove life support, the hospital still exhibited cruelty, refusing his parents’ request to let Charlie die at home or at a hospice center, instead of at the hospital. Charlie died on July 28th, 2017.
- S.T. was a teenager who wanted to fight for her life, but was denied that opportunity by the British medical system. S.T. had a mitochondrial disease, allegedly similar to that of Charlie’s, and had lived in an intensive care unit (ICU) for a year, receiving nutrition through a gastrostomy tube, using mechanical ventilation, and receiving regular dialysis. She also had sight and hearing loss, muscle weakness, bone disease, and damage to her kidneys and lungs… and a perfectly functioning brain. Despite examinations from multiple psychiatrists affirming that S.T. was not mentally ill, a court still ruled against her, even though they admitted the experimental treatment she wanted to try might help. Their reasoning was that since she would still likely die prematurely, it wasn’t worth the effort. Her family vowed to appeal the ruling, but S.T. died before they could – and the court ruling barred them from even speaking her name, adding insult to injury.
- Alfie Evans was treated horrifically by medical staff in the United Kingdom before he died. After beginning to have seizures at nine months old, Alfie was admitted to the hospital. Doctors said he was in a “semi-vegetative state,” and had encephalomyopathic mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome. Despite the fact that no official diagnosis was ever made, doctors still claimed medical care for him would be futile. His parents then began a months-long legal battle fighting for Alfie’s life, and wanted to leave the United Kingdom for medical care. They raised money for his care, found air ambulance companies willing to transport him, and – like Indi – Alfie was named an Italian citizen and offered medical care at Bambino Gesù. Yet a British court ruled he could not be taken to Italy, and Alfie was not only removed from life support, but was denied nutrition and hydration for over 28 hours. Doctors said he would die right away, but when he didn’t, they were forced to resume feeding him. Alfie continued to breathe on his own for four days, before he died on April 23rd, 2018. It was later revealed that the hospital spent nearly $200,000 fighting to be able to kill Alfie. The hospital was also allegedly caught selling the organs of their pediatric patients.
- In the United States, Jahi McMath defied all the odds. After undergoing a throat surgery as a teenager, Jahi initially seemed to be recovering well, then suffered cardiac arrest and was declared brain dead. Her mother was told to remove life support, but she refused. Eventually, Jahi was released to her mother’s care, and she was flown from California to New Jersey. There, Jahi showed that she was not brain dead; she was able to comply with simple demands, although sometimes slowly, and her body never deteriorated as predicted. She had a menstrual cycle, was able to receive nutrition from a gastronomy feeding tube (nutrition which doctors said her body would not be able to tolerate and absorb), and was able to live in an apartment with nothing more than a ventilator, hormone supplementation and nutrition, and nursing care. Simply put, Jahi was disabled, but not dead. However, the state of California issued Jahi a death certificate from the time she was declared brain dead. Five years later, Jahi passed away due to complications from surgery.
Life has value, even if it means living with disability, despite the apparent discrimination that seemed to play a role in many of these cases. Essentially, if a person cannot have a so-called “productive” life and will require lifelong medical care, all too often the national health care systems would rather save money and end a person’s life rather than give that person a chance to live with a disability.
Tell President Trump, RFK, Jr., Elon, and Vivek:
Stop killing America’s future. Defund Planned Parenthood NOW!
