Loving Parents, Vulnerable Children

"Chemo is a death sentence."
"It should be the parents' final say. They were obviously given this child for a reason, so isn't it they who are supposed to protect that child and ensure that child comes to no harm?"
"I used to be a proud Canadian. I was proud of my health care. ... Now I come to find out that at the end of the day, I don't have a say in anything."
Marco Pedersen, Ottawa, Ontario

"We understand that no parent takes a decision to withhold medical treatment lightly."
"But when such a decision threatens the life or safety of a child, we look to the courts to make a final decision."
Eva Schacherl, spokeswoman, Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario

"The reality is a parent or substitute decision-maker cannot make decisions that will cause harm. They don't have that right."
"We need to focus on the end goal here, which is saving this girl's life."
Dr. Fitzgerald, president, McMaster Children's Hospital, Hamilton, Ontario

"I don't want the medicine they were giving me in the hospital. It made me really, really sick. It hurt my belly for lots of days and my hair fell out."
"I know now that all those things happened to me because poison was being put in my body."
Makayla Sault, Six Nations reserve, Brantford, Ontario

Whatever would put the notion into eleven-year-old Makayla's head that doctors at McMaster Children's Hospital were putting poison into her body? The child was diagnosed in August with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, a cancer of the bone marrow. This is a dread diagnosis for any loving parents, and by all accounts, Makayla's parents are just that. But her horrible malady, once a death sentence, now has a 90- to 95-% cure rate, as far as the oncologists at the hospital are concerned.

Makayla was being given necessary, and standard treatment for her condition. And then partway through the initial 32-day chemotherapy course her mother refused further treatment in favour of pursuing the holistic healing honoured by her family's ancestral practises, and prepared to take her daughter to a private facility located in Florida. Makayla's mother wrote an explanation, published on the website of the aboriginal newspaper Two Row Times in which she stated "I will not have my daughter treated with poison."

And nor, then, did Makayla, a sick child who was feeling even worse through the treatment phase, want to continue having 'poison' pumped into her. When the doctors at the hospital were unable to convince her family that for her own preservation she must remain in the care of the hospital, the Brant Children's Aid Society was called in to intervene, and the agency decided after much thought not to support the hospital's claim, but to allow the parents to pursue the 'alternative' they chose.

Youtube/Two Row Times    Eleven-year-old Makayla Sault reads her letter explaining why she has asked her parents to take her off chemotherapy and pursue traditional aboriginal medicines instead. “I know that what I have can kill me, but I don’t want to die in a hospital on chemo being sick,” Makayla said. Within New Credit First Nation, Makayla’s health decision is considered perfectly natural.

Ubaka Ogbogu, a professor in the Health Law Institute at the University of Alberta said: "I haven't really seen this before. What makes this unique is that we now have a secondary issue, which has become a primary issue, which is the question of who has the authority to pursue the best interest [of the child]?" Well, in this particular instance the issue is clouded by the fact that this is a First Nations family and exceptions are made for cultural sensitivity, although the case is by no means yet settled.

Decades earlier, when health authorities began to run up against parents refusing blood transfusions for their critically ill children because Jehovah's Witness religious values spurned such interventions, the Supreme Court of Canada considered the matter and ultimately ruled that state intervention is a legitimate limitation on religious freedom. That the rights of a "child in need of protection" surmounted the parents' Charter rights to freedom of conscience and religion.

This is the law in Canada, that conventional, up-to-date medical protocols are to be used to save the lives of vulnerable children whose parents in an ill-conceived loyalty to religious precepts would make choices placing their children in mortal danger. In the case of Aiden Pedersen, the infant required chemotherapy after being diagnosed with leukemia and his father refused to allow it. He insisted he planned to explore alternative treatments. And chief among those alternatives was the use of cannabis oil to rescue his toddler from the disease that afflicted him.

In this instance, the Children's Aid Society managed to prevail upon the child's mother to agree to chemotherapy, and the father who stuck by his refusal, was not allowed access to the child, undergoing therapy. Ample evidence exists indicating that over 80% of all children given conventional treatment for acute lymphoblastic leukemia survive at least five years, up from a meagre one in 10 who survived in the 1960s. Medical science is steadily evolving.

Mr. Pedersen remains engaged in court action to have his son's treatment restored to his agency and taken from the hospital, arguing to overturn the order that prohibits him from interfering in his son's chemotherapy treatment. He insists on the efficacy of cannabis oil to cure his child's leukemia, and fumes that he, as the father of the child, has been taken out of effective commission as the little boy's defender against a hostile world of interfering doctors and child care specialists.

Mr. Pederson claims cannabis oil to represent an active treatment that will not make his child ill in comparison to the miserable side-effects of chemotherapy. He frequents websites that laud the substance as a cancer cure in children. There are some laboratory and animal studies exclusive of human trials that suggest cannabis may have cancer-fighting potential,Cancer Research UK claims. But even they caution that it is "highly misleading to patients and their families" to consider cannabis a proven treatment.

There are simply times when society must step in to protect vulnerable children from the ignorance of their parents in refusing to have them exposed to medical treatment that the parents consider harmful to their children suffering the potential life-ending effects of a dread disease.