R Waves of Change

Janice Langbehn and Lisa Pond were together almost 20 years. They had adopted foster children and created a good life for their family in Washington State. Last summer they decided to take three of their children on a family cruise — but they never left the port in Miami.
 
Lisa, a healthy 39-year-old, had been cheerfully watching her children play basketball on the boat’s upper deck, when she suddenly collapsed. She was rushed by ambulance to Jackson Memorial Hospital and diagnosed with a fatal brain aneurysm. 

When Janice and their children arrived at the hospital, a social worker was confrontational and rude to them. He told Janice that she was in an antigay city and state. Hospital staff would not give Janice any information about Lisa and kept the family from seeing Lisa for hours. Lisa lay dying alone with her family just feet away in the next room. 

No one should have to go through what this family went through at the hospital, making a horrible tragedy worse. That seems like common sense. But even as we are making enormous strides for equality in America, this case is a stark reminder of the kind of discrimination that LGBT people and people with HIV continue to suffer. And it’s particularly egregious when it comes during medical emergencies, when everyone deserves to be treated with compassion. 

Lambda Legal has filed a lawsuit against Jackson Memorial Hospital on behalf of Janice and her children. We hope to win justice for the family and also to educate people about discrimination in hospitals and health care settings. We’ve also launched a petition campaign urging the next President of the United States to create a health care plan that ensures equal access for LGBT people and people with HIV in hospitals and health care settings.

Equal access means treating people without discrimination and honoring the wishes of all patients. It also means that hospitals must create visitation policies that have a broader definition of who is considered “family.” It never occurred to Janice, for instance, that she would not be treated like her partner’s family. “We had spent almost 20 years of our life together, were raising children together,” Janice recalled. “If that’s not family, I don’t know what is.” 

On top of their deep commitment to each other, Janice and Lisa had created medical power of attorney documents, which Janice had a friend fax to her at the hospital as soon as she got there. A power of attorney or health care proxy allows you to choose the person you want to make medical decisions for you and authorizes doctors and other medical staff to release information to this person. (For more information on health care documents, see “Take the Power,” Lambda Legal’s life-planning toolkit.

All people should execute these documents, but for LGBT people and people with HIV they become crucial for two reasons:

1. While different-sex spouses in every state automatically receive the right to make medical decisions for each other, same-sex couples, even those that have married, do not have this right in most states. A medical power of attorney is one of the few ways anyone can alert health care staff about their medical wishes and who should be making decisions about these wishes.
2. When discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity or HIV status does occur, having this documentation gives Lambda Legal and other groups a stronger base that we can argue from.

Nothing can bring back Lisa Pond or the nearly eight hours Janice Langbehn lost with her dying partner. But we can all learn something from her suffering and help make sure this doesn’t happen again.