Latest news with #MicheleBennett
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Lawsuit filed against Kansas law nullifying end-of-life choices for pregnant women
Three women and two physicians are suing to block a Kansas law that invalidates a pregnant woman's advance medical directive about end-of-life treatment. The plaintiffs — one of whom is currently pregnant — are challenging the constitutionality of a clause in the state's Natural Death Act that denies pregnant women the option to make advance directives to accept or refuse healthcare if they become incapacitated or terminally ill. Patient plaintiffs Emma Vernon, Abigail Ottaway and Laura Stratton and physician plaintiffs Michele Bennett and Lynley Holman filed the lawsuit on Thursday. It argues that the clause violates the right to personal autonomy, privacy, equal treatment and freedom of speech by ignoring the end-of-life decisions of pregnant women. Cdc Removes Covid Vaccine Recommendation For Healthy Children, Pregnant Mothers Vernon, the pregnant plaintiff, wrote an advance healthcare directive stating that, if pregnant and diagnosed with a terminal condition, she would only like to receive life-sustaining treatment if "there is a reasonable medical certainty" that her child would reach full term and be born "with a meaningful prospect of sustained life and without significant conditions that would substantially impair its quality of life." The lawsuit says her directive has not been "given the same deference the law affords to others who complete directives because of the Pregnancy Exclusion, and therefore she does not benefit from the same level of certainty that the directive otherwise provides." Read On The Fox News App All states have laws allowing people to write advance directives on the medical care they would like to receive if they become unable to make their own health decisions. Nine states, including Kansas, have clauses to invalidate a pregnant woman's advance directive. The physicians who joined the lawsuit said the law requires them to provide pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than other patients and opens them up to civil and criminal lawsuits as well as professional penalties. The lawsuit says the doctors "are deeply committed to the foundational medical principle that patients have a fundamental right to determine what treatment they receive, and that providing treatment without a patient's informed consent violates both medical ethics and the law." New Mom Furious At Husband For Choosing Friends And Barbecue Over Her And Their Newborn "Yet Kansas law compels them to disregard their patients' clearly expressed end-of-life decisions, forcing them to provide their pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than any of their other patients receive," it continues. "It demands this diminished care without offering any clarity on what end-of-life treatment they are required to provide—leaving them to guess at what the law expects while exposing them to civil, criminal, and professional consequences for getting it wrong." The defendants in the lawsuit are Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, Kansas State Board of Healing Arts President Richard Bradbury and Douglas County District Attorney Dakota article source: Lawsuit filed against Kansas law nullifying end-of-life choices for pregnant women
Fox News
7 days ago
- Health
- Fox News
Lawsuit filed against Kansas law nullifying end-of-life choices for pregnant women
Three women and two physicians are suing to block a Kansas law that invalidates a pregnant woman's advance medical directive about end-of-life treatment. The plaintiffs — one of whom is currently pregnant — are challenging the constitutionality of a clause in the state's Natural Death Act that denies pregnant women the option to make advance directives to accept or refuse healthcare if they become incapacitated or terminally ill. Patient plaintiffs Emma Vernon, Abigail Ottaway and Laura Stratton and physician plaintiffs Michele Bennett and Lynley Holman filed the lawsuit on Thursday. It argues that the clause violates the right to personal autonomy, privacy, equal treatment and freedom of speech by ignoring the end-of-life decisions of pregnant women. Vernon, the pregnant plaintiff, wrote an advance healthcare directive stating that, if pregnant and diagnosed with a terminal condition, she would only like to receive life-sustaining treatment if "there is a reasonable medical certainty" that her child would reach full term and be born "with a meaningful prospect of sustained life and without significant conditions that would substantially impair its quality of life." The lawsuit says her directive has not been "given the same deference the law affords to others who complete directives because of the Pregnancy Exclusion, and therefore she does not benefit from the same level of certainty that the directive otherwise provides." All states have laws allowing people to write advance directives on the medical care they would like to receive if they become unable to make their own health decisions. Nine states have clauses to invalidate a pregnant woman's advance directive. The physicians who joined the lawsuit said the law requires them to provide pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than other patients and opens them up to civil and criminal lawsuits as well as professional penalties. The lawsuit says the doctors "are deeply committed to the foundational medical principle that patients have a fundamental right to determine what treatment they receive, and that providing treatment without a patient's informed consent violates both medical ethics and the law." "Yet Kansas law compels them to disregard their patients' clearly expressed end-of-life decisions, forcing them to provide their pregnant patients with a lower standard of care than any of their other patients receive," it continues. "It demands this diminished care without offering any clarity on what end-of-life treatment they are required to provide—leaving them to guess at what the law expects while exposing them to civil, criminal, and professional consequences for getting it wrong." The defendants in the lawsuit are Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, Kansas State Board of Healing Arts President Richard Bradbury and Douglas County District Attorney Dakota Loomis.
The Guardian
23-05-2025
- Climate
- The Guardian
‘Destruction everywhere': Taree cleanup begins as NSW floods reignite inter-agency tensions
For the second time in just four years, Michele Bennett has lost pretty much everything. The 50-year-old returned home on Friday to find most of her belongings destroyed after a record-breaking flood engulfed her house in Croki, a tiny community north of Taree, earlier in the week. 'All the beds are gone,' she says. 'I opened the fridge to get a can of soft drink out and there was two foot of water in the veggie crisper. 'It's two inches of water right through the house. The washing machine – everything's pretty well gone.' Bennett and her partner, Mario Agus, sheltered with their 96-year-old neighbour, whose house is on higher ground, as a coastal trough inundated the New South Wales mid-north coast and Hunter regions. Five people have died. Another 50,000 are isolated. In Taree, the Manning River rose to an unprecedented 6.5m, surpassing the previous record set in 1929 by half a metre. By Friday, the rain had cleared and locals were taking stock of the damage. In central Taree, people wheeled shopping trolleys full of debris down Pulteney Street, dragged soaked mattresses out of buildings and filled skip bins with mountains of rubbish. Croki, right on the Manning River between Taree and the coast, was also badly affected. Many residents, still recovering from serious flooding in 2021, couldn't afford rising premiums and were uninsured for flood damage this time around, Bennett says. She and Agus are among them; faced with a $30,000 premium, they had to opt out. 'We'll just have to start saving and buying the essentials as we need them [and] just sort of start again, basically,' Bennett says. 'Everyone in the community has been a bit flat … but at the same time, you've got to look at the good in life. We are all safe, we are dry, and we all have each other.' 'This morning there was a beautiful rainbow. I'm not sure if Mother Nature was playing tricks with us or not, but it was fantastic.' Bennett says the NSW State Emergency Service (SES) volunteers have been 'really good'. One dropped off a gas bottle for someone who was out, another came round with a Webster pack for her elderly neighbour. Out on the flood plain, Ian Sharp said he and his nephew were trying to feed a 250-head of cattle on a 'massive' dairy farm that had been 'just destroyed'. Some farmers were forced to leave their cows behind to drown. 'It's dead cattle and destruction and debris everywhere,' Sharp says. 'Like, high water's high water, but it's what it does to people's livelihoods [that] is the devastating part of it.' Sharp, an oyster farmer, and another oyster farming family from the area rescued dozens of people and their pets earlier in the week. In terrible weather, they steered their oyster punts down the submerged streets using Google Maps to work out where the roads would have been. 'We rescued some older people that were just absolutely in shock. They had no idea where they were going to go and what was going to happen to them,' Sharp says. 'We were helping these people get in boats and with their dogs and their medication and an overnight bag and all that sort of stuff.' Sharp is critical of the SES, the volunteer organisation which is the lead agency in responding to floods. The other oyster farmers rescued many people from Dumaresq Island including a family of six that was stranded, said another farmer, Ian Crisp. He claims SES volunteers on the ground told the oyster farmers they weren't allowed to put the family of six in their boat until they 'got permission from command'. The SES strongly disputes this claim 'The NSW SES does not require flood rescue crews to seek approval … before allowing community members into boats,' a spokesperson for the agency says. 'In a lot of cases members responding to incidents have encountered others needing rescue along the way and have picked them up.' The floods have reignited long-running tensions between the SES and the firefighters union, who have pushed for Fire and Rescue NSW (FRNSW) to take over as the lead agency for all disaster responses. 'For years we have campaigned for the lead combat agency for large-scale emergency events of this nature to be allocated only to professional agencies with trained operators ready to respond,' the Fire Brigade Employees Union wrote in a Facebook post on Thursday. In the same post, the FBEU claimed its members were being 'left to sit on their hands while SES members struggle to turn out with adequate crewing'. The FBEU declined to comment further when contacted by Guardian Australia. FRNSW also declined to comment. One Taree resident, Val Schaefer, believes some of the response could have been better coordinated. Her partner, who is a retained firefighter with FRNSW, had to assist in evacuating aged-care residents from the Bushland Care units with rubber rafts at 3am on Wednesday. 'They talk about pre-deploying assets? We couldn't get our heads around why they didn't pre-evacuate the aged-care residents,' she says. A NSW SES spokesperson said it commenced a coordinated response on 14 May and has been working closely alongside all partner agencies, including FRNSW, since then. They rejected any suggestion that the SES could not cope with the number of calls. 'At no time during this recent flooding event has the NSW SES exceeded its capacity … for call taking,' they said. 'The NSW SES has answered over 12,000 calls since the start of this event, with the average speed of answer being sixty-two seconds.' The SES says it has more than 11,400 volunteers and the number is growing. 'Since the beginning of this flooding event, the NSW SES and partner agencies have responded to nearly 7,000 incidents, including over 700 flood rescues,' a spokesperson said. The emergency services minister, Jihad Dib, says 'there are always things that can be improved' and reflected upon, but he had confidence in the SES remaining the lead agency for this kind of disaster. 'This is a professional outfit that is doing an extraordinary job,' he told Guardian Australia. 'It's a longstanding and known fact that the FBEU would think paid firefighters should be replacing volunteers. 'They think they could do what the volunteers could do, and I don't know that the capacity is there.' Dib said the government had invested 'quite heavily' in flood rescue capability and worked hard to improve the way different emergency services coordinate their responses to disasters, following the catastrophic northern rivers floods of 2022. 'I want a situation where all of our emergency services respect one another. I'm seeing it on the ground,' he says. 'In the worst of times we see the best of people. I'm seeing that.' Schaefer says seeing her beloved Taree underwater made her 'just want to cry'. People have been cooking meals for one another and offering each other hay and rescuing cows that have washed up on the beach, she says. 'There's so much kindness in our community, she says. 'But they're also sad.'
Yahoo
08-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
United Way of the Wabash Valley awards over $60,000 to the children
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTWO/WAWV)— The United Way of the Wabash Valley has awarded $61,601 to two Success by 6 programs in the area. These programs are aimed at strengthening early childhood development and aim to benefit children across the Wabash Valley. The United Way gave $39,689 through its On the Path to PTQ grant program to five home-based childcare providers. On the Path to PTQ is a program to support those providers and improve their quality of care, and help them progress in the state's Path to QUALITY (PTQ) system. The PTQ system is how the state rates early care and and education and the improvements needed. The PTQ system allows families to identify quality childcare programs through a rating of one to four, where one means licensing compliance and four means national accreditation. Providers that participate in the United Way's grant program can receive up to $10,000 for classroom improvements, professional development, and steps toward the level four accreditation. The locations who received the grants are: ABC Preschool and Daycare Sammie's Sunshine Academy Kidzplay Little Duckling Childcare Bailee's Buddies 'Licensed home providers are essential to our region's early learning ecosystem,' said Executive Director Dorothy Chambers. 'We're investing in their growth so more children can benefit from stable, enriching, high-quality early learning environments.' Lastly, through the Successful Parenting Initiative, the United Way gave $21,912 to the Terre Haute Children's Museum. This money will be used to start an innovative research-backed program for families with children aged 3 to 18 months. The program will teach parents/caregivers the benefits of guided play. Guided play is an evidence-based approach to learning that supports brain development during the quickest part of children's cognitive growth. The program specifically serves families enrolled in the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program, to give easier access to high-quality developmental opportunities. 'We know that early exposure to STEM concepts and adult-guided exploration lay a foundation for lifelong learning,' said Michele Bennett, Community Impact Specialist at United Way. 'This program gives families the tools to grow and learn together.' Guided play blends child play with parental direction. According to the news release, research shows that when a caregiver participates by asking open-ended questions and models curiosity, children develop stronger language skills, problem-solving, and critical thinking. The new program at the museum will coach parents to become active learning partners with their kids. Key features of the program are: Family engagement events at the Children's Museum, featuring interactive play stations aligned with early STEM, literacy, and social-emotional learning. · Take-home kits with 'guided play' activity cards, prompts, and short videos created by local university students to reinforce learning at home. · Access Pass sign-ups, helping low-income families afford Children's Museum visits all year long. · Special events, including a holiday Family Night and storytelling sessions with guest educators. 'With support from United Way, we're empowering parents and caregivers to be confident co-learners,' said Holly Curtsinger, Director of ISU's Early Childhood Education Center and co-chair of Success By 6. 'It's not just about helping children succeed in school—it's about nurturing the parent-child bond and building strong, stable families.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
