Miller Ex Rel. Miller v. HCA, INC.

The narrow question we must decide is whether Texas law recognizes a claim by parents for either battery or negligence because their premature infant, born alive but in distress at only twenty-three weeks of gestation, was provided resuscitative medical treatment by physicians at a hospital without parental consent. The court of appeals, with one justice dissenting, held that neither claim could be maintained as a matter of law because parents have no right to refuse urgently-needed life-sustaining medical treatment for their child unless the child’s condition is “certifiably terminal” under…