Dr. Paul Byrne, an Ohio neonatologist with nearly five decades of experience says, “there’s no case” when a child is on a ventilator where the tracheostomy wouldn’t be indicated. He called the attempt to have the state remove Joseph’s ventilator “terrible, absolutely terrible,” and insisted that in his fifty years in neonatology he’s never removed a child’s ventilator. “I’ve never seen a time to turn off a ventilator. If a baby has a disease process that’s so bad that they’re going to die, then they die on the ventilator anyway. So you don’t have to stop the ventilator.”
He also criticized the common phrase “life support,” saying, “Life is either there or it’s not there. You don’t have to hold up the life. What we do in medicine are actions ... that support the vital activity of respiration. Assuming doctors can do something to support the vital activities, we ought to do them,” he explained. “And a tracheostomy ought to be done, and the baby ought to continue on the ventilator.”
Though doctors have said Joseph is in a “vegetative state,” Dr. Byrne called it a “made-up term” similar to the notion of “brain death,” which he said was invented “simply to get beating hearts for transplantation.” LifeSiteNews
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