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The Linares Affair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 April 2021

John D. Lantos ,
Steven H. Miles  and
Christine K. Cassel
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Extract

On August 2, 1988, 6-month-old Samuel Linares aspirated a balloon at a birthday party and was unconscious and blue when his father, Rudolfo, found him. Nine months later, his father used a gun to keep medical staff at bay while he disconnected the respirator keeping his comatose son alive. Mr. Linares ignited much soul-searching among pediatricians, lawyers, and ethicists about treatment decisions for profoundly damaged children.

Public discussion of the ethics of forgoing life support in pediatric care moves like a pendulum betweeen fear of inappropriately allowing children to die and fear of unrestrained life-supporting technology. In the early 1970s, physicians’ and theologians challenged accepted tenets of law and ethics by proposing that pediatricians should allow critically ill or severely disabled babies to die without the most aggressive use of technology. By 1982, Baby Doe caught the nation's moral imagination and raised the possibility that withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining procedures amounted to sanctioned infanticide. This concern led to restrictions on the right of parents and doctors to decide to discontinue treatment. Public sympathy for Mr. Linares suggests that the pendulum may be swinging back toward a less restrictive public policy about forgoing life-sustaining treatment in children.

Type
Article
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , Winter 1989 , pp. 308 - 315
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1989

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Footnotes

*

This is not the only such case. In 1986, Edward Baker of California was sentenced to 255 days in a work furlough program and three years probation for using a gun to force a nurse to remove life support from his father with cancer. In 1986, a weeping Phoenix man used a shotgun to hold doctors at bay for two hours after he disconnected a respirator from his comatose brother. These cases, where weapons are used to assert family standing vis a vis medical authority in the care of irreversibly ill persons, are quite unlike other instances where persons have used weapons to directly take the life of irreversibly ill family members. (The authors thank Lawrence Nelson and Les Rothenberg for this information.)

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