According to the Washington Post:
President Obama mandated Thursday that nearly all hospitals extend visitation rights to the partners of gay men and lesbians and respect patients’ choices about who may make critical health-care decisions for them, perhaps the most significant step so far in his efforts to expand the rights of gay Americans.
While Obama is making a good faith attempt to appease gays, this order could backfire badly.
In 1987, while still a nursing student, I took a part time position working in the intensive care unit of a Miami area hospital. A patient in her early 30s had just been brought into the ICU in a coma after suffering a seizure as result of a post-partum hemorrhage. She had just given birth to a baby girl and during childbirth she lost a tremendous amount of blood — too much blood loss to sustain life.
Normally, in a case like this, the doctor would order blood transfusions and the patient would be fine. But this patient and her husband were Jehovah’s witnesses, and the husband made it clear that he did not want the doctors giving his wife the life saving blood transfusions.
Of course we pleaded with the husband to change his mind, to no avail. Because he was her husband, he had every right by law to give her a death sentence. So we had to watch this beautiful young sistah — who had just given birth to a healthy baby girl — die slowly in front of our eyes while her husband walked around the unit with a smirk on his face.
I look back on this sad incident because now Obama is extending that same right to the partners of gay patients who are not married. So theoretically, If you’re gay, you could meet someone next week, and one week later if you’re involved in a car accident that leaves you incapacitated and in a coma, your “partner” of one week could pull the plug on you.
