From a reader
The Tragedy of Jahi McMath and the Campaign to Promote Superstition and Anti-Science
January 13, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
From a reader;
A really horrible situation has unfolded in Oakland over the past few weeks. On December 9, 13-year-old Jahi McMath came to Children’s Hospital in Oakland for three surgical procedures to treat sleep apnea. The surgery seemed to go well. But hours later, blood started pouring out of her mouth and she went into cardiac arrest. Although doctors were able to get her heart beating again, blood was not circulating to her brain, which led to total and irreversible brain death. The coroner issued a death certificate for Jahi, dated December 12. The shock and disbelief of Jahi’s mother Nailah Winkfield and the rest of the family was more than understandable. But this family’s pain and religious faith was seized on by forces larger than this family, turning one tragedy into another.
Almost immediately, all the local mainstream media began to pump out anti-scientific propaganda about this case. First, they demonized Children’s Hospital, and promoted the assumption that there must have been malpractice for Jahi to end up brain dead from a “routine tonsillectomy.” In fact, this was not simply a routine tonsillectomy on an otherwise healthy child—although further details about Jahi’s health, the nature of the surgery, and what went wrong afterward cannot be released due to privacy laws. Jahi’s family, of course, has every right to sue, and the courts have the responsibility to determine whether or not there was malpractice. But, A) it shouldn’t be assumed in advance of an investigation that this was malpractice. All surgery involves risk. And even “routine tonsillectomies” on very rare occasions result in deaths. And B) Children’s Hospital is an important institution. Despite the financial challenges it faces as a safety net hospital for those without insurance, Children’s has done a pretty good job serving poor kids in Oakland for decades, including by pioneering research and treatment for sickle cell anemia, a painful blood disease that primarily affects African Americans.
The campaign on the part of the media, the family’s lawyer, the courts, certain local African American religious institutions, and even some right-wing Christian fundamentalist forces on a national level, to promote superstition and undermine science quickly intensified. They turned the question of “why did she die,” into “was she really dead” and “why is Children’s trying to pull the plug on her?” It wasn’t just that the family kept refusing to accept that Jahi was really dead, and kept praying to God for a “miracle.” For weeks now, the media has covered this story in a way that treats Jahi as if she was still alive, where “dead” is put in quotations, and the false hope of this family for a “miracle” is elevated above the scientific fact that Jahi IS dead and she’s not coming back. The family’s lawyer, Christopher Dolan, has gotten judges to grant restraining orders forcing Children’s to keep Jahi’s dead body on a ventilator, and has been unsuccessfully attempting to force Children’s to do a tracheotomy and insert feeding tubes... all of which has been falsely characterized by the media as “life support.” He has dragged out supposed “experts” like Dr. Paul A. Byrne, past president of the Catholic Medical Association, who insist (without having examined Jahi’s body) that she is “not brain dead” and can recover with “proper nutrition and care.”
Think about the legal precedent that is set if hospitals can be forced to perform surgeries on dead bodies, and dedicate resources toward “care” for the dead! Think about how that would affect health care, ideologically and practically. Religious leaders in East Oakland have organized prayer vigils, which have been attended by hundreds of people, and there have been protests outside of Children’s calling for “Justice for Jahi” and “Keep Jahi alive.” Behind the scenes, the Christian fundamentalist Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network has been fundraising to get Jahi’s body transferred, apparently to a facility in Medford, New York, called “New Beginnings.” The network and the facility issued statements reading, “Jahi McMath has been labeled a ‘deceased’ person. Yet she retains all the functional attributes of a living person, despite her brain injury. This includes a beating heart, circulation and respiration, the ability to metabolize nutrition and more. Jahi is a living human being.” The New Beginnings statement adds, “We do encourage every citizen to take the time to educate themselves more clearly on the issues of what brain death is and what it is not.” I couldn’t agree more with that last part. And the fact that so many people in this society are so mis-educated about basic science—trained to believe in “miracles” instead of learning to understand the world and the way things really work—has made way too many people easy prey for groups like Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, with their religious nonsense masquerading as science and their phony concern for Jahi and her family. Let’s be honest, these right wing Christian forces that Jahi’s family have aligned themselves with don’t give a fuck about “life,” especially Black life. As Bob Avakian pointed out recently,
The crude and venomous rantings of Phil Robertson, “patriarch” of the “Duck Dynasty,” show once again how, especially in the U.S., Christian fundamentalism is closely bound up with racism, slavery and Jim Crow (old and new), anti-gay hatred, “traditional” oppression of women, and in general a thoroughly outmoded, all- around reactionary worldview and values. Robertson’s invocation of Biblical scripture, as justification for vicious oppression, is yet another vivid illustration of the fact that “The Bible, taken literally, is a horror.”
But let’s clear up some basic science about the brain, and why “brain death” equals death. The human brain has different parts that play different roles in creating conscious thought, emotions, and maintaining life functions: the brain stem is the part of the brain that regulates and controls and regulates breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure and other basic life functions; the cerebral cortex controls consciousness, processes ideas, responds to other humans, and stores memories; the thalamus is the part deep within the brain that is a center for sensation, including pain and pleasure.
In Jahi’s case, all three parts were irreparably dead. Jahi is not “brain damaged.” Jahi is not in a coma. She is not even in a “Permanent Vegetative State” (where the brain stem keeps functioning), as Terri Schiavo was—the Florida woman who was finally disconnected from feeding tubes in 2005 after a major societal and legal battle. Jahi’s entire brain is dead, with no chance of recovery. At least six doctors, including one from another hospital, have examined her and confirmed the death. Her body is “breathing” because of a ventilator, which is temporarily keeping her heart beating as well. There may be some spontaneous bodily twitch or motion, but there is no electrical signal coming from the brain at all.
As David Magnus, director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, said in the New York Times, “There’s no reported case of a correct diagnosis of brain death where anybody comes back,” Magnus “added that while death occurs after an hour because of a lack of blood flowing into the brain, Jahi has not had blood flowing into her brain since at least Dec. 12.” These are the facts. It certainly must be hard for the family to come to grips with. But promoting false hope and prolonging the suffering and uncertainty of the family is not doing them any favors. As Santa Clara University professor, Lawrence Nelson, told the San Francisco Chronicle, “This is not compassion... She is gone, and no prayer, no judge, no transfer to a different facility can change that.”
But what has been the dominant message from the media for the last three weeks? Deliberate confusion about the science of brain death, and the promotion of superstition. It’s one thing for Jahi’s highly religious family to think she is still alive and to believe that she can be awakened by divine intervention. But it’s another thing for the media to trumpet that, to treat it as a legitimate idea on par with the scientific facts, and to attack Children’s Hospital for acting on those facts. This is not just “corporate media,” this is propaganda media. It is designed to promote and reinforce capitalist values and ways of thinking, and a general ignorance about the world, to systematically mis-educate people. But how should people be educated? What is the responsibility of the media and school system? As the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal) says, in the section on education:
The educational system in the New Socialist Republic in North America must enable people to pursue the truth wherever it leads, with a spirit of critical thinking and scientific curiosity, and in this way to continually learn about the world and be better able to contribute to changing it in accordance with the fundamental interests of humanity. To this end, in the study of human society and its historical development, and in the social as well as the natural sciences in general, the pursuit of the truth, through the accumulation of facts and empirical evidence and the synthesis of this through logical reasoning and rational discourse, including the testing of ideas against reality, shall be the objective and standard. Scientific and other theories which have met these criteria and have been clearly confirmed and validated through the scientific method (such as evolution, which is one of the most soundly confirmed and well established facts in all of science) shall be presented as what they are—true and valid understanding of reality...
In the current society (in contrast to the alternative vision laid out above), way too many people are kept in the dark about science. Compounding that is the skepticism that many people feel toward the medical establishment, which has come to the surface in relation to Jahi McMath, and is not entirely without reason. There is the long history of racist pseudo-science (false science pretending to be scientific) being used to justify oppression, erroneous theories about the supposed natural biological “superiority” and “inferiority” of the “races,” etc. There was the Tuskegee experiment 1932-1972, where the U.S. Public Health Service literally tested the effects of syphilis on hundreds of Black males in rural Alabama who thought they were getting free health care from the government.
And then there are the grotesque modern day disparities in health and health care. Go watch the movie, Waiting Room, about Highland Hospital, Oakland’s adult safety net hospital, and you see up close and personal the trials and tribulations that poor people, immigrants, and Black people face just to get some decent health care. It is not that the doctors, nurses, and hospital staff are out to make people suffer in pain while waiting for hours or even days to get treated at the ER... it’s that they are all constrained by the lack of resources, by a cold and brutal system of capitalist health care.
If you watch Elysium, the recent sci-fi movie about a future world where the rich live on a space colony and have the technology to cure any medical problem, while the masses of people are trapped in polluted slums on Earth and have to take the most desperate measures when they are sick... you see a world not that different from our own. With all that, it’s not hard to see why many people, Black people in particular, would feel they are being mistreated, not treated as full human beings whose lives matter. And they are right! But it is quite another thing to be against science itself. And it is a big mistake.
Let’s not mystify science. Science is a method for investigating reality and it is a body of knowledge based on thousands of years of human beings doing that. And that is something that has the potential to benefit humanity greatly. The problem with the Tuskegee experiments was not science—the problem was that Black people were (and still are) oppressed in Amerikkka. In fact, by 1947 scientists had figured out how to treat syphilis with penicillin, but they continued with the study anyway without treating those men... again, not because of science, but because of a system based on oppressing Black people!
Science, and the scientific method of investigating and coming to understand reality, is not just something for scientists. It is what the most oppressed actually need to get free. The fact is, as Bob Avakian put it in BAsics, “Oppressed people who are unable or unwilling to confront reality as it actually is, are condemned to remain enslaved and oppressed.” And we should ask, in whose interests is it for oppressed people to remain ignorant about how society works and how it can be changed? Whose interests are served when oppressed people are on their knees praying for salvation and putting everything in “God’s hands”?
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