The state of Connecticut has forced a 17-year-old girl with cancer to undergo chemotherapy, a move the teen and her mother are now challenging in court, Fox CT has learned.
The patient, identified as "Cassandra C," was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma in September 2014, a cancer doctors say is highly treatable with chemotherapy. But when Cassandra refused the treatment, the state Department of Children and Families took temporary custody of the girl and forced her to receive it.
With the support of her mother, Cassandra C took legal action and brought her case to the Connecticut Supreme Court after a lower court ruled in favor of DCF. Both claim the daughter's constitutional rights have been violated since DCF intervened without finding the family incompetent. The court is scheduled to hear the case on Thursday.
"[These] are her human constitutional rights to not put poison in her body," Jackie Fortin, Cassandra's mother, explained to Fox News. "Her rights have been taken away. She has been forced to put chemo in her body."
With chemo, which can lead to vomiting, nausea and hair loss, doctors say Cassandra's survival rate is about 80 percent, the Hartford Courant reported. But she believes the treatments can cause as much harm or more than the cancer she has, which affects the lymphatic system and weakens the body's ability to fight infection.
"The bottom line is this mother doesn't give an eloquent explanation of why she's refusing," Dr. Keith Ablow said Tuesday on "Fox and Friends," dismissing the family's choice. "She says it kills all the cells in your body. That's not true."
Medical evidence aside, it's up to Fortin's lawyer, Michael S. Taylor, to convince the court Cassandra is mature enough to make her own decisions, otherwise known as the "mature minor doctrine."
"It's a question of fundamental constitutional rights- the right to have a say over what happens to your body- and the right to say to the government 'you can't control what happens to my body," Taylor told Fox CT.
A public defender is representing Cassandra.
DCF said it's obligated to get involved when there is a general medical consensus that "a child will die as a result of leaving a decision up to a parent..." according to the Hartford Courant.
"[E]ven if the decision might result in criticism; we have an obligation to protect the life of the child when there is consensus among the medical experts," DCF said.
