Life Legal Defense Foundation is a pro-life organization – and part of its caseload involves hospitals that are putting patients in situations that sometimes are lethal. AFN spoke with Alexandra Snyder, CEO for the organization.
"People go into a hospital [and] are put on comfort care or palliative care that they did not request – and that immediately comes with a lot of sedatives, morphine, a lot of other drugs like Ativan," the attorney explains. "It seems like that's to help people calm down [but] that also really renders them incapacitated."
According to LLDF, there have been occasions when family members who have power-of-attorney for those decisions are not honored. Snyder says that's when Life Legal Defense Foundation steps in.
"We help in cases involving the protection of vulnerable life from the moment of conception all the way through to natural death," she shares. "And we handle a lot of cases involving the withdrawal of life-sustaining care – and we are able, in almost every case, to intervene and get care restored."
But that's not always the case. In an Ohio case, a cancer patient wanted to leave the hospital for home and could have – but he was drugged, the wife as power-of-attorney was ignored; and before the legal organization could become involved, he died. He did have Stage 4 cancer.
