HOUSTON (AP) – Parents of a 2-year-old girl involved in a drowning incident on Memorial Day have sued to stop Texas Children\u2019s Hospital from testing if she\u2019s brain dead, testing a new strategy in Texas\u2019 \u201cright to life\u201d movement aimed at giving people as much access to life-supporting services as possible.<\/p>\n
While most fights to keep patients on life support begin after they\u2019ve been given a brain death diagnosis, Annelise Camp\u2019s parents are battling the hospital at an earlier stage, the testing phase.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not settled science,\u201d said state Rep. Steve Toth<\/a>, R-The Woodlands, who has helped drive the public\u2019s attention to the Camps, who live in Cypress.<\/p>\n Brain death is defined in Texas law<\/a> as the irreversible cessation of brain function. Under the law, once a patient is declared brain dead, a hospital can withdraw life-sustaining measures.<\/p>\n According to court documents, the Camps say Annelise shouldn\u2019t be tested for brain death so she can have more time to recover. They also ask that she be transferred to another hospital to explore other treatment options. However, Texas Children\u2019s has stated<\/a> it wants to conduct testing to determine next steps in her medical care and that it has no imminent plans to end care for Annelise.<\/p>\n This case has drawn the attention of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton<\/a>, who posted<\/a> on X in support of the Camp family: \u201cI am closely monitoring this case and will act to protect this child and honor her parents\u2019 efforts to save her.\u201d Influential anti-abortion group Texas Right to Life has started working with the family, too.<\/p>\n Given growing attention to the Camp family\u2019s fight, bioethics and legal experts say that this could empower other families to fight brain testing, which is becoming more common. The case has already inspired at least one lawmaker to create new laws and build on Texas\u2019 existing laws that protect the rights of patients and their families to extend life-sustaining services and access experimental treatments.<\/p>\n The lawsuit is the latest chapter in a yearslong fight among some right-to-life advocates to end the brain death diagnosis because they believe multiple organs have to fail to be considered a biological death.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, medical experts believe there needs to be a \u201cclear line\u201d that distinguishes life from death otherwise ICUs would lose capacity to treat patients that have a chance of recovery, said David Magnus, a Stanford University medicine and biomedical ethics professor.<\/p>\n It appears no courts in Texas have determined the legality of brain death tests, said Thomas Mayo, professor emeritus of law at Southern Methodist University. If the state district court rules in the family\u2019s favor, it would not be binding in other courts, Mayo said.<\/p>\n However, \u201cif Texas Right to Life is involved in any way, and the family loses, this case would likely go to appeal,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n The Camp family were visiting relatives on Memorial Day, when Annelise wandered into the hotel pool without her life jacket, Johnston Camp, Annelise\u2019s father, told FOX 26<\/a> Houston in early June. She was pulled out of the water by family members who began CPR until first responders arrived. Camp was taken to Texas Children\u2019s west Houston location and after an hour her heartbeat returned.<\/p>\n \u201cShe never gave up when I asked her to do something\u2026 I\u2019m never gonna give up on her,\u201d Camp told the station.<\/p>\n Since the interview, the Camps have declined speaking to The Texas Tribune, citing a court order that prevents them from doing so, said their lawyer Heath Novosad. Texas Children\u2019s has also declined to comment on the case.<\/p>\n Three days after Annelise was hospitalized, her parents filed a temporary restraining order against Texas Children\u2019s after physicians said they had exhausted all treatment options and advised that the child get tested for brain death, according to court documents filed in late May. The documents say Annelise\u2019s heart was beating, although she was dependent on a ventilator. The Camps have refused any brain death testing and want to transfer Annelise to another hospital to receive hyperbaric oxygen treatment or stem cell therapies.<\/p>\n Texas Children\u2019s officials said in court documents they\u2019ve contacted medical facilities to ask about accepting Annelise, but 35 of the 36 have declined and the one pending hospital said it needed her to undergo brain death testing to consider transfer.<\/p>\n The court granted the family\u2019s request for a temporary injunction and the family is asking for a permanent halt to brain testing.<\/p>\n Hospitals usually notify family members, but are not required to get permission from them or the patient to conduct brain death testing.<\/p>\n Under the Uniform Determination of Death Act, if someone is determined brain dead, they are considered legally dead and hospitals have the right to discontinue organ-supporting services.<\/p>\n According to Texas Right to Life, which has long fought the legal recognition of brain death and its use to stop life-sustaining measures, brain death is not consistent with the Christian faith. As long as there is a heartbeat, a person is still alive. The Camp family has stated in court documents brain death testing is against their religious beliefs.<\/p>\n \u201cTexans have the right to say we don\u2019t believe in this,\u201d said John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life, adding that his organization has worked with 106 patients to fight for life-sustaining treatment, an increase in the last three years. \u201cA dead person has no rights, and that\u2019s the problem with the brain death concept, in general, is it is a shortcut to deprive individuals of the right to life and other rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Magnus, the Stanford professor, said that if hospitals are no longer able to diagnose someone with brain death and are forced to keep more people on life support, this could strain resources, such as ICU beds.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing that scarce resource for somebody who has no chance of ever making any recovery doesn\u2019t really make a lot of sense,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen the hospital beds are full, Texas will not be a good place to get sick.\u201d<\/p>\n Magnus worries that if hospitals are no longer allowed to recognize brain death diagnosis, organ procurement could decline which places the burden of organ donations on other states or else, many Texans could be at risk of dying.<\/p>\n \u201cThat means that if you have renal failure, you die. You have liver failure in Texas, you\u2019ll die. When you have heart failure in Texas, you\u2019ll die,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n While some of the loudest critics of the brain death diagnosis have been among anti-abortion advocates, not all are in agreement. Texas Alliance for Life points out that the definition of death<\/a> in state law is based in \u201csound medical science,\u201d its executive director Amy O\u2019Donnell said. She declined to comment specifically on Camp\u2019s case.<\/p>\n In the last few decades, Texas legislators made attempts to create and fine-tune \u201cright to life\u201d laws that expand the rights of those who have been declared brain dead. None have addressed brain death testing, which is ripe ground for new legislation.<\/p>\n \u201cWe passed legislation in the state of Texas and we think people will just follow it,\u201d Toth said.<\/p>\n In 2023, state lawmakers expanded the Right to Try law \u2013 originally limited to terminally ill patients \u2013 to give chronically ill patients access to investigational treatments if they had exhausted approved options. The same year, the Legislature changed the Texas Advance Directive Act, so that hospitals must give families of patients 25 days\u2019 notice before pulling life support, increasing it from 10 days. Although, groups like Texas Right to Life believe that there should be no time limit.<\/p>\n This change came three years after the family of 1-year-old Tinslee Lewis challenged the advance directive act, also garnering national attention<\/a>. Lewis was born with a rare heart defect that kept her on life-support in Cook Children\u2019s Medical Center\u2019s ICU from birth. Leveraging the law\u2019s life-support time limit, doctors at the Fort Worth hospital wanted to take Tinslee off life support against her mother\u2019s wishes and an appeals court ruled in the family\u2019s favor<\/a>. Lewis was discharged after two years, according to CBS<\/a>.<\/p>\n Toth, who carried the House version of the bill that changed the Right to Try law in 2023, said he would push to give families the right to contest the brain death test and make it difficult for hospitals to procure organs from patients declared brain dead.<\/p>\n Toth, who won the Republican primary for Texas\u2019 2nd Congressional District in Houston in the spring, ultimately wants to eliminate the brain death diagnosis on a national level.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that we\u2019ve got to be really careful at just observing the rights of parents to make this decision, this call for themselves,\u201d said Toth.<\/p>\n Texas does not have legislation that provides for a reasonable accommodation of a religious objection to brain death, said Mayo.<\/p>\n If the brain death diagnosis was taken off the books, hospitals can still leverage the Texas Advance Directive Act which places a time limit on how long a hospital is responsible for life-supporting treatment, Magnus said, but \u201ccourts in Texas have been inconsistent about applying their own law.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cCourts in other states have gone back and forth over whether a determination of brain death can be done at all, and whether once it\u2019s done, the physician\u2019s findings are determinative of further treatment or stopping treatment. I think it\u2019s a very, very emerging question that is getting disparate treatment in various jurisdictions,\u201d said Mayo.<\/p>\n In these cases, the courts will usually tell the hospital to keep the patient on life support, said Magnus. \u201cBasically the courts don\u2019t want to be the one that makes (the brain death) determination,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" HOUSTON (AP) – Parents of a 2-year-old girl involved in a drowning incident on Memorial Day have sued to stop Texas Children\u2019s Hospital from testing if she\u2019s brain dead, testing a new strategy in Texas\u2019 \u201cright to life\u201d movement aimed at giving people as much access to life-supporting services as possible. While most fights to … Continue reading Houston drowning tests whether Texas law gives the right to deny brain death testing<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[164],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1517620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-state-news"],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 10:39:39","action":"change-status","newStatus":"trash","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1517620"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517620\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1517628,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1517620\/revisions\/1517628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1517620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1517620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ktbb.com\/post\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1517620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The brain death debate<\/h4>\n
Room to expand \u201cright to life\u201d laws?<\/h4>\n