Parents of Terminally Ill 'Baby Joseph' Battle Hospital to Keep Him Alive

The parents of a 13-month-old baby who has a fatal neurological degenerative disease are fighting doctors in Canada for the right to keep him alive.

Moe and Nader Maraachli were told two weeks ago that their son,Rift Gold known as "Baby Joseph," could not be cured and would stay in his current vegetative state, ABC News reported. They were given a consent form allowing physicians to take the small boy off life support.

The devastated parents refused to sign it. And now they're battling the hospital for their son's survival.

The case highlights the ethical dilemma that health-care providers and parents of a terminally ill child often find themselves facing:RIFT Platinum How much time and money should be spent on keeping a child with a fatal disease alive?

Alex Schadenberg, the family spokesman and the executive director of the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition, said they've only just wanted to bring Joseph home so that he can live his final days out there.

"They weren't asking for extraordinary medical treatment or for the government to pay for a ventilator with an in-home nurse," he told ABC.

The hospital where the child has been staying since October 2010, London Health Sciences Centre, rift goldsays it sides with the Consent and Capacity Board on the proper course of treatment.

"It involves transferring him home, on a breathing machine, and then placing him the arms of his family before withdrawing the machine," the hospital said in a statement to ABC. "The transfer would not involve performing a tracheotomy, which ... is frequently indicated for patients who require a long-term breathing machine. This is not, unfortunately, the case with Baby Joseph, because he has a progressive neurodegenerative disease that is fatal."

The case has stirred considerable controversy and outrage among people in both Canada and the United States, RIFT Platinumwith supporters of Baby Joseph's parents starting movements on Facebook to protest the medical community's actions. One of the groups, known as Save Baby Joseph, has more than 13,000 members, and another, Save Baby Joseph Maraachli, has over 1,300, ABC said.

Baby Joseph has also become something of a poster child for the fight against a government-funded health care system like Canada's, which has become a heated topic of debate after the far-reaching U.S. health care reform bill was passed in the fall.

In the end, the issue comes down to whether doctors or families have the right to choose whether to end a terminally ill child's life.

Dr. Sarah Friebert, a pediatric palliative care doctor in Akron Children's Hospital in Ohio,TERA Gold said health-care providers should do everything they can to honor the parents' requests, unless they're clearly not doing what is best for the child, according to ABC.

"The process involves bringing in other people to support the family with any sort of emotional, religious or spiritual issues that we need to understand better," Friebert said. "It often feels like an impossible choice because death is such a final option and parents are understandably going to try everything to avoid that."