2 parental-rights bills on medical treatment competing in House

Despite the presence of Parker Jensen, a bill that would give parents the right to make all medical decisions unless they had been declared incompetent was not voted on by a House committee Wednesday.

The problem for members of the House Health and Human Services Committee was not the intent of the SB90, but the presence of a competing substitute bill. The current SB90, which is the fourth substitute, requires the state Division of Child and Family Services to prove parents incompetent before forcing medical treatment, while a sixth substitute bill that was introduced in committee would have required that DCFS only prove that the parent's medical treatment choice was not reasonable.

Rep. Steve Mascaro, R-West Jordan, sponsored the sixth substitute because he said he believes that requiring DCFS to prove incompetency "was too broad" and required an investigation into irrelevant aspects of a parent's background. By only requiring proof that reasonable medical treatment was not being provided, the child's health would be the primary consideration.

"Rather than going to all of these aspects of the parenting, this goes to whether the medical decision is reasonable," he said. "This focuses the decision on the real issue, the medical treatment."

Sen. David Thomas, R-South Weber, the sponsor of SB90, while not supportive of the sixth substitute, said he was willing to work with Mascaro to narrow the focus of the bill. Ideally, he wanted a stronger requirement than just proving reasonable treatment, since many alternative treatments — such as homeopathic medicine — are not considered reasonable by doctors.

"There's got to be something more than the doctor's opinion to override the parent," he said. "The whole idea is that it's been too heavily weighted on the one side, and this is trying to balance it."

Daren Jensen, who attended the hearing with his son Parker, urged the committee to give parents more power over their children's health. Parker was at the center of a fight with DCFS because of a cancer diagnosis at Primary Children's Hospital that the Jensens wanted to treat in Europe.

"We have to give the parents a little breathing room," he said. "We have to let them make the decisions."

The committee did not vote on the bill and returned it to the House Rules Committee for "sifting," the process used to determine the priority of bills as they are forwarded to the House floor. A majority of the committee members did urge, however, that a compromise be found between the two bills before it is sent out of Rules.

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