Preemie Bioethics Speaking Trip!
Parents about to have a micropreemie are unprepared for the ethical dilemmas that face them in the hospital. Doctors will ask if they want treatment for their baby or to "let the baby go." Or in our case, we had to talk an uncooperative doctor in to treating our son.
Doctors and parents often don't show up to this conversation speaking the same language. Antenatal counseling involves a presentation of statistics from the doctor in which potential severe disabilities are given as a reason to let a baby die. Parents, on the other hand, want to know what kind of daily life they might lead with their baby, and how to adjust.
I am going to give a presentation at a conference of medical professionals and clergy members in Boston about our experience and provide my recommendations to doctors for how to seek out the motivations of parents at a crisis birth. All life glorifies God, even if it lasts for only a few minutes, and even if it involves pain and suffering.
I live in Seattle, Wash., and I need help to pay for air fare, ground transportation and food to get to Boston. Being a stay-at-home parent and a writer has not proved to be a very lucrative occupation, and so I need help to get there.
This event is put on by the Orthodox Christian Association of Medicine Psychology and Religion. The name of the conference is "On Pain and Suffering," and it is being held Nov. 3-5 at Holy Cross Seminary in Brookline, Mass., near Boston. I am Orthodox Christian myself, so this is a very big deal for me to get connected to other Orthodox thinkers on bioethics. I want to create resources on the topic of treatment of infants born at extreme danger of death for parents, for clergy and for medical professionals, and this conference will be an opportunity to meet the people who make and distribute such things. And, this is a great way for me to meet people who might provide additional speaking opportunities for my preemie advocacy work later.
I need to buy the tickets before the prices goes up, so let's have the deadline be October 12.
Brief bio on me:
Eric Ruthford is an author and non-profit manager. In 2010, he published his first book, Heaven Help the Single Christian, a humor guide to dating for young adults seeking love at church. Earlier in his career, he was a newspaper journalist, reporting for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Herald of Everett, Wash. Leaving journalism, he joined the Peace Corps and served two years in Ukraine, teaching English as a foreign language, before coming back and working as the finance manager of a homeless shelter in San Francisco, Raphael House. At present he is seeking a publisher for his medical / fatherhood memoir, Please Cry: A Father's View From Outside the Incubator. He blogs about his book and his work at http://theydontcry.wordpress.com and is on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/micropreemiedad
This video shows our son in his second day in the NICU, and then at 3 years of age.
