No Liability for Reviving Just-Born Baby
A medical team that successfully revived a newborn, allegedly without the parents’ consent, has no liability for doing so to the child or his parents, the Washington Supreme Court decided today.
After 24 minutes of resuscitation, the 35-week infant survived, but with severe disabilities. The plaintiff parents consented to an emergency caesarian section, but the mother was unconscious, under general anesthesia, and the father wasn’t in the operating room as their baby was revived, the court’s opinion recounts.
While the existence, or lack, of informed consent is normally a jury question, the facts of this case clearly demonstrate an emergency that justified the physician in charge’s decision to resuscitate without attempting to explain the situation to the baby’s father and get his informed consent, the opinion states. “We hold that (the baby’s) father was not ‘readily available,’ as a matter of law, because there was no meaningful opportunity for a deliberate, informed decision to refuse consent where the failure to treat meant certain and immediate death.”
The case did not require it to decide, the majority notes, “whether a parent may decide to refuse life-saving treatment on behalf of a child and, if so, under what circumstances.”
