Stolen hope tears family's dignity
By Linda Gibson (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-02-11 10:22
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A lot of people owe apologies to the family of the infant dubbed "Little Hope".
She is the baby girl born on Jan 15 in Tianjin with multiple birth defects, including a heart ailment. According to reports of an online post from the baby's aunt, 30 family members met to discuss her dilemma.
Given the severity of her ailments and the uncertainty of success, the family agonized about the pain of treatment and the disadvantages of physical handicaps if she survived. So her father placed her in a hospice and paid for her treatment there.
Yet headlines in newspapers from here to Hong Kong have trumpeted the falsehood that her family "abandoned" her.
This is irresponsible sensationalism. It's evident that the Chinese public needs education about what hospices do.
The fact is that people of all ages are placed in hospices - if they're lucky - because they have been diagnosed with terminal illnesses. Hospices don't accept any other kind of patient.
Because their patients all are terminally ill, hospices don't offer treatment to prolong life. There would be no point; these patients can't be helped by such remedies.
Instead, teams of doctors, nurses, social workers, counselors, physiotherapists, dietitians and spiritual care givers work to relieve the patient's pain and distress. Their goal is to make the patient's remaining time and their death as peaceful, comfortable and dignified as possible.
For Little Hope's family, this must have been a painful decision. Well-meaning people can disagree with it, or think they might have made a different choice in those circumstances.
But they're misinformed to assume, as some people have, that putting a loved one in the care of a hospice demonstrates indifference, cruelty or abandonment.
Instead of explaining what hospices do, the media quoted inflammatory rants from netizens. One called the family's hospice decision "a death sentence" and "murder". This kind of highly emotional and irrational statement acts like gasoline on a spark.
Next thing we know, a small group of people posing as rescuers kidnapped Little Hope from the hospice where, they charged, she had been "left to die".
They took her away from her family and brought her to a hospital in Beijing and talked about suing her family for abandonment and indirect intentional homicide.
These vigilantes, posturing as moral superiors to those who disagree with them, ought to be worrying about criminal charges, not threatening others with baseless lawsuits.
Fortunately for Little Hope, the hospital wisely refused to subject her to surgery without her father's consent. People willing to publicly condemn this family might want to consider how their actions could affect Little Hope's mother, who reportedly was told her baby had died.
The family won't be able to keep the truth a secret now that it's been splashed all over the country's news sites. Imagine how she will feel learning that her child was kidnapped and her family publicly denounced.
This whole awful saga contains lessons to be learned.
Let us hope that Tianjin Children's Hospital, from where the baby was kidnapped, improves its security. Parents of sick children shouldn't have to worry, on top of everything else, that their kids might be snatched.
Let us implore netizens to express their opinions without rancor.
Finally, let's suggest that China's news media exercise some common sense. Quoting inflammatory statements from anonymous netizens and treating kidnappers as credible sources of information do not meet basic standards for news reporting.