March 22, 2002
Calgary Jehovah teen who doesn't want transfusions seeks move to Ontario
CALGARY (CP) -- A teenage girl who has been ordered to receive blood transfusions against her will wants to leave Alberta.
Lawyers for the 16-year-old Jehovah's Witness want a transfer order allowing her to seek treatment for leukemia in Ontario or the United States.
But the girl's father, who believes the blood transfusions can save her life, is worried the challenge is just a way to move her to a jurisdiction where she can refuse treatment.
"The father does not want a transfer," Robert Calvert, lawyer for the girl's father, said outside court Friday. "He thinks the care here is very, very good and the move would be traumatic."
He said Ontario law allows patients at age 16 to make decisions about their care and her father is worried she will exercise that right.
"She may withdraw the consent and that would be a death sentence for her," he added.
Calvert said he suspects the treatment being contemplated in Ontario is simply palliative care to help her through her final days.
The lawyer representing the girl and her mother rejects that, saying she simply wants treatment in line with her religious beliefs.
"She wants to move; she wants to live," David Gnam told the court. "This is not a death wish."
Last month, an Alberta judge made the teen a temporary ward of the province after determining she did not have the capacity to make that decision.
On Friday, Justice Adele Kent of Court of Queen's Bench moved up an appeal of that case from April 25 to April 4. The judge gave the girl's lawyers until Monday to provide detailed information on treatment she would get elsewhere.
Children's Services officials must decide by next Thursday whether to challenge the motion to move the teen.
Doctors say the best available treatment for the girl's potentially fatal disease is chemotherapy followed by blood transfusions. She has received 12 transfusions in the last month at the Alberta Children's Hospital.
The girl is to begin another bout of chemotherapy next week.
Gnam says the treatment is much the same as what doctors in Calgary are doing, but without blood transfusions.
"The doctor has told me of six Jehovah's Witness patients he's treated with this method," said Gnam, whose law firm in Georgetown, Ont., works primarily for the religious sect.
"Of the six, five survived and one died, but not because he or she was a Jehovah's Witness, but because of other complications of the disease."
Gnam filed an affidavit saying the girl no longer wants to remain at the Children's Hospital. In court, he said she has been strapped down, sedated for transfusions and kept "in solitary confinement" away from her mother.
The lawyer for the girl's father rejects the allegations.
"Because of the disruptions that the mother was causing during the transfusions and the chemotherapy, they've asked that she not come in during those treatments because it was causing the child harm," said Calvert.