Taken from Advocate.com:
Apparently, hospitals in Miami don't care about lesbian couples, even when they've shared an 18-year-long relationship and 3 children.
Lesbian Denied Access to Dying Partner Files SuitA lawsuit was filed in Miami Wednesday against a hospital that refused to allow a lesbian see her partner of 18 years before dying because the hospital did not consider the two women family.
The suit will be filed by Lambda Legal on behalf of Janice Langbehn.
Langbehn and Lisa Pond had planned to take their three children on a family cruise, but just as they were about to depart on the cruise from Miami, Pond, 39, suddenly collapsed, according to Lambda Legal. She was rushed to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, with Langbehn and the children following close behind.
Other than one five-minute visit, neither she nor her children were allowed to see Pond until nearly eight hours after their arrival.
Soon after Pond’s death, Langbehn tried to gain access to her death certificate in order to obtain life insurance and Social Security benefits for their children. She was denied both by the state of Florida and the Dade County medical examiner. (The Advocate) "
It's pretty sickening to think that these two people were denied the right to be with one another the way they should have been able to just because the hospital did not think them to be "family". The first definition for "family" on the Merriam-Webster website defines the term as "a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head" and goes on further to say in another entry that a family can also be "the basic unit in society traditionally consisting of two parents rearing their children; also : any of various social units differing from but regarded as equivalent to the traditional family <a single-parent family>". Funny, but I see nothing about having a family consist of a mother and a father there. This is truly a backwards world we live in when people overlook basic human compassion due to a person's sexuality.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Miami Sure Loves Itself Some Equal Rights!.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/7789
Weekly Feministing Newsletter
Feministing RSS Feed
This whole story is just so depressing. When I go over why same sex couples demand legal rights and I always get one person who says, what does it matter, it's just a piece of paper, I always give examples of situations that can occur to try to get them too see how it really does effect same sex relationships. This is just another horrible example of how individuals are denied certain rights and that even if it was a non married man and women these questions would never be asked which is why heterosexual couples never really think about it.
My heart goes out to this entire family, I couldn't imagine not being able to see my husband or my father because some people had decided that they didn't count as my family