Multiple LGBT news sources have been reporting on a story from last Sunday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal that Spring Valley Hospital in Clark County, Nevada, has denied a lesbian the right to make medical decisions for her pregnant domestic partner. When Brittney Leon and Terri-Ann Simonelli went to the hospital in July after Leon began experiencing complications with her pregnancy, an admissions officer told them that Simonelli could not make medical decisions for Leon without a power of attorney—despite the fact that they are legal domestic partners in the state, which should give them the same rights as married couples to make medical decisions for each other. Leon ended up losing the pregnancy.
According to the Review-Journal, “the admission officer’s words left them devastated in a moment that they already were under extreme stress.” The hospital had no problem, however, accepting Simonelli’s insurance policy, under which Leon is covered.
On a contrasting note, remember Jackson Memorial Hospital in Florida (part of the Jackson Health System (JHS)), which in 2007 denied Janice Langbehn and her children the right to see Lisa Pond, her partner and the children’s other mother, when Pond lay dying of a brain aneurysm? The incident precipitated a phone call to Langbehn from President Obama, and a memo from him to the Department of Health and Human Services to create a new regulation guaranteeing that patients could designate their visitors, including same-sex partners. Well, JHS yesterday posted quite a nice piece titled “Sexual Identity: What’s this all about?” in its Mental Health Hospital Blog.
The piece is only one of a number of steps JHS has taken to improve its policies and training related to LGBT patients and their families since Pond’s death. In 2011, it was one of only 27 healthcare facilities in the U.S., and the only one in Florida, to be named a “Leader in LGBT Healthcare Equality” by the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a fact that JHS promotes on its homepage.
So: Clearly we still have a long way to go before we can rely on equal treatment from all hospitals, even when the law is on our side. But if one hospital can make changes, so can others. Over to you, Spring Valley.
This disgusts and terrifies me. My wife and I lost our daughter in February (stillborn, 37 weeks) and the hospital treated me so very well. We have health care directives, so we should have been covered, but our marriage is not recognized in our home state of Minnesota. I really feel for these parents. So sad.
This is awful! My heart goes out to anyone who gets hammered by people’s ignorance when what they need is their compassion.
I went into PTL @ 26 week and can’t imagine what it would have been like for us if we hadn’t already supplied both my OBGYN and the delivery hospital with copies of my medical power of attorney. It was just part of the information we had on hand for my entire pregnancy. It came in handy again when I delivered @ 32 weeks. We also had on hand forms stating my partner had the authority to make medical decisions for our twin boys. It is not right that we have to take these extra precautions but it was something we were well aware of when we started the pregnancy process and everyone (with few exceptions) was amazing to us, our boys, and the unique entourage who came and went from the hospital during our 3 stays.
One of the most upsetting things to me about this case it that the paperwork for a Medical Power of Attorney in NV is simple and requires signatures from the patient and either two witnesses or a notary. I don’t understand why the hospital employee didn’t simply hand Brittany Leon the POA paperwork and tell her to read it and decide whether she wanted to complete a POA. Isn’t it in the hospital’s best interest to have as many patients as possible fill out POAs? I really encourage everyone to google their state and advance directive or medical power of attorney. In my state the process took five minutes and cost nothing.