When baby Simon Crosier was born with Trisomy 18  and a heart defect in 2010, his parents and brothers fell in love with him despite his life-threatening diagnosis and the medical community’s opinion that Trisomy 18 is “incompatible with life”.

However, just days before three month old Simon was scheduled to see a cardiac surgeon, his parents begged for help at the Catholic hospital treating Simon when his condition started to deteriorate. They were shocked when the staff did not intervene. They did not know that the hospital had made their baby a Do Not Resuscitate and that Simon was given only so-called “comfort feeds” due to a secret futility policy. They had to helplessly watch as Simon died in their arms.

Heartbroken and outraged but determined that this would not happen to another child, the Crosiers went to legislator Bill Kidd who formulated Simon’s Law. After five long years of frustration even getting the bill out of committee, Simon’s Law was finally and unanimously passed in the Missouri legislature and signed by Governor Mike Parson last year.

The law prohibits “any health care facility or health care professional from instituting a do-not-resuscitate or similar order without the written or oral consent of at least one parent or legal guardian of a non-emancipated minor patient or resident.”

I testified on Simon’s Law myself because when my own daughter Karen was born in 1982 with Down Syndrome and a heart defect, I was tipped off that my pediatrician had secretly given Karen a Do Not Resuscitate order against my expressed wishes because she felt I “was too emotionally involved with that retarded baby”. I protested and the order was withdrawn.

During the fight for Missouri’s Simon’s Law, other states passed similar laws. Some require only that parents be informed that doctors plan to write a DNR order for a child while others prohibit writing the order over parental objections. Hospital ethics committees are usually involved, especially when such cases go to court. And some states like Texas have problematic laws that give objecting parents 10 days to find a new healthcare facility if they disagree with doctors and ethics committees who decide to take a child off life-sustaining treatment.

However, the strongest type of “Simon’s Law” yet was just signed into law in Iowa on June 29, 2020 by Governor Kim Reynolds.

The law states that:

“A court of law or equity shall not have the authority to require the withdrawal of life-sustaining procedures from a minor child over the objection of the minor child’s parent or guardian, unless there is conclusive medical evidence that the minor child has died and any electronic brain, heart, or respiratory monitoring activity exhibited to the contrary is a false artifact.” (Emphasis added)

This is stunning, especially since it requires conclusive medical evidence that the child has died using the most stringent criteria of no brain, heart or respiratory activity. (As one legislator explained in a video, the “false artifact” provision would prevent a “crooked parent” from keeping the child on life support indefinitely in a felony murder situation.)

In recent years, we have seen court cases like the teenager Jahi McMath who lived for years and even seemed to improve after a diagnosis of brain death and now the case of Baby Tinslee with heart and lung problems whose doctors want to remove her ventilator against the parents’ wishes.

At the very least, this new Iowa law illustrates the necessity of better legal protections for both medically vulnerable children and their parents.

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