Word: hennepin
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Retired schoolteacher Helga Wanglie, 87, has lain in a vegetative state at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis since last May. There is no possibility of recovery. Doctors have told Oliver Wanglie, Helga's husband of 53 years, that they want to end life support for a patient whose prospects seem so hopeless. Cost is not an issue: the family's health insurance covers almost all expenses. But Wanglie refuses to permit the demise of his spouse, who, according to him, believed firmly that only God should make such a determination. "She told me that if anything happened...
Authorities at Hennepin have failed to persuade the retired attorney to transfer his wife to another facility or file for an injunction that would force the hospital to continue care. Therefore they plan to take a disturbing and unprecedented step: asking a state court to grant the hospital permission to disconnect Helga's life-support systems. "We don't feel the physicians should be forced by the family to provide inappropriate medical care," says Dr. Michael Belzer, Hennepin's medical director...
...welter of life-or-death cases wends through various state courts, only two outcomes seem relatively clear. The first is that a patchwork of state-level decisions will provide no definite guidelines. The second certainty, in the words of Hennepin's Belzer, is that "there are going to be thousands of cases like this in the future...
...Hall, editor then of the Pioneer Press & Dispatch and now of the Bergen (N.J.) Record, in defense of his decision. But critics point out that Hall could have kept the bargain with Cohen by simply attributing the information to a "Whitney supporter." "This is a very simple case," says Hennepin County Chief Public Defender William Kennedy, a Democrat. "A promise is a promise...
While hardly settling every issue, the court's action encourages employers to push ahead with affirmative action to cure past discrimination. "It will give us a feeling of not being out there fighting the battle all alone," says O.J. Silas, director of affirmative action for Hennepin County (Minneapolis). "This is the clearest thing I've heard in a long time that the courts do mean what they said and support the principles of affirmative action...