Do we really know the facts?

In a short but very strong editorial of January 16, 2007, titled “A careful decision to comfort an angel”, the Seattle Times wrote, “Without knowing the facts, they suggest the parents are selfishly acting for their convenience. Others are questioning the ethics of the medical professionals involved. They shouldn’t.”

Right. We shouldn’t criticize without knowing the facts.We shouldn’t agree, defend or commend without knowing the facts, either.

Facts are important. That’s what I thought when I first learned about Ashley. I was shocked. But I was mainly perplexed. I needed some basic facts before I knew how to even think about this. Basic facts such as what kind of girl Ashley really is; What her disabilities are precisely like ; What was done to her. ; For what purposes.

Trying to establish these basic facts, I turned to the first-hand information. The two most important documents of the case : the article Dr. Gunther and Dr. Diekema wrote in the October 2006 issue of the journal of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescence Medicine and Ashley’s parents’ blog.

The first thing I tried to do to establish the basic facts was to match the given details between the two documents. It was not easy as I had expected. I got more and more perplexed as I read. What the doctors said in the article and what Ashley’s parents said in their blog didn’t seem to match well. I read again, this time more carefully. Some early questions were already starting to form themselves in my mind. The facts seemed much more complicated than what was reported in the news. 

Then I extended my reading to what the doctors and Ashley’s father were quoted in the newspaper articles. Again, I tried to match the details with those in the first two documents. I found a peculiar fact. The fact that the doctors weren’t always consistent in what they said while Ashley’s father was almost always consistent. I found it also curious that the doctors tended to be vague and sometimes even evasive while Ashley’s father was always precise, concrete and totally confident.

What does it mean? Why do they say this here and that there? There were many questions. Small ones at first. But careful reading in search for possible answers for a simple question would often lead to more questions, sometimes bigger ones. That’s how this small personal attempt to try to understand began to develop into a research.

It’s been more than a year since. I still believe facts are important as the Seattle Times wrote in the middle of the last year controversy. It is important to know the facts to know the truth.

So here are the first questions I would like to ask in this blog.

Are we really sure of the facts of “the Ashley story” we are so very familiar with?

Are we really sure that our debate over the ethics committee’s decision to approve Ashley’s parents requests is based on the hard established facts?

(For example, are we aware of the fact that it was a “special” ethics committee that approved the parents request on May 5, 2004? What is the implication of the fact? How was it “special” and why did it have to be a “special” ethics committee to discuss this particular case? That’s one of the mysteries around the ethics committee of May 5, 2004. See Exhibit L of the WPAS Investigative Report. Read the later post “Special committee” to exclude outsiders? for details.)