Sophie’s choice

Wed, 08 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Sophie Brassard, a 37-year-old single mother in Canada, is scheduled to fight in a Montreal court today for the custody of her two children, 4 and 8. She wants them back. The state wants them placed in permanent foster care. The reason: Brassard, who is HIV positive, has refused her doctor's advice to treat her children, both of them HIV positive, with the drug AZT. She believes it will kill them.

Though the Canadian government has not formally charged Brassard with any crime, it removed the children from her care in July, when she was detained at the Montreal airport while trying to leave the country with her kids. In the course of her custody hearing, the court is expected to decide, for the first time in Canada, whether the state has the power to mandate medical care.

The decision, even though it will come from a Canadian court, is expected to have significant impact in the U.S., where parents who withhold medical treatment from their children, often for religious reasons, have found themselves in court with no legal precedent to guide their arguments. Their opponents struggle in the same void, as decisions tend to vacillate on a state-by-state, case-by-case basis.

Curing with compassion

Mon, 21 Jun 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Jonathan Parker Abramson was an energetic, red-haired child, so full of life that it seemed to radiate from him. He loved running along the Esplanade in Carl Schurz Park in New York, his little arms pumping. Like many young boys, he loved to play sports and music. He had an easy, infectious giggle. Nurses recall his flushed, cheerful face as he entered their ward, and how he began to resemble a little Buddha as his hair fell out and his features swelled from chemotherapy treatments. In 1981, Jonathan died from a malignant brain tumor. It was four months before his fifth birthday.

This little boy's death has served to bring together two cultures. Since 1996, Beth Israel Medical Center, on Manhattan's Upper East Side, has maintained a dialogue with experts in alternative and Eastern medicines, including the Dalai Lama, in an effort to provide its patients with more compassionate care. The hospital took a step toward furthering that goal with the unveiling of the Jonathan Parker Abramson Safe Harbor, a monument to one courageous little boy, in a space consecrated by the controversial spiritual leader of Tibet.

Salon.com > Alyson Mead

Sophie’s choice

Curing with compassion