Committee voted No  Pct 3036

Whereas, every year in Texas, an unreported number of vulnerable patients of every age—such as I-year-old Tinslee Lewis of Fort Worth, 56-year-old Jose Portillo of Amarillo, and 61-year-old Carolyn Jones of Beaumont—are victims of the unethical, unconstitutional, and unprecedented 10-Day Rule in the Texas Advance Directives Act;

Whereas, Section 166.046, Texas Health and Safety Code, contains the anti-Life 10-Day Rule, which enables hospitals to unilaterally withhold or withdraw a patient's basic Life-Sustaining Treatment (like a ventilator) against the patient's or patient's family's will without any appeal; and

Whereas, the 2020 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas asserts that "We support legislation repealing the unethical 'Ten-Day Rule' in Section 166.046, Health and Safety Code, which allows physicians to withdraw basic life-sustaining treatment (like a ventilator) after an impending countdown" (Plank 277); and

Whereas, the 2020 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas further asserts that "We also support legislation replacing the Ten Day Rule with a truly life-affirming law that requires a patient's or surrogate's medical decision about basic life-sustaining treatment to be honored until the patient is transferred to another physician or facility that will honor the decision to continue life-sustaining treatment" (Plank 277); and

Whereas, the second principle of the 2020 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas affirms our belief in "The sanctity of innocent human life, created in the image of God, which should be equally protected from fertilization to natural death"; and

Whereas, no other state has such an egregious and unethical law that violates the patient's Right to Life by handing over critical and personal medical decisions to physicians and hospital committees comprised of strangers, rather than relying on the patient's expressed medical decision, written directive, or designated surrogate decision-maker; and

Whereas, the Legislative Priorities Committee of the 2020 Republican Party State Convention named Repealing the anti-Life 10-Day Rule as one of the ten Legislative Priorities offered to Republican delegates, but was not ultimately selected among th t p eight; a d

Therefore, be it resolved that the Republican Part of ounty recommends the

Legislative Priorities Committee of the State Convention adopt as a Legislative Priority for the 88th Legislative Session a call for the Texas Legislature to repeal the unethical, unconstitutional, unprecedented, and anti-Life 10-Day Rule, and replace it with a truly Life-affirming law that requires that physicians adhere to a patient or surrogate's medical decision about life-sustaining Treatment and which provides for physicians who disagree with the patient's decision to transfer the patient to another ph