FORT WORTH (1080 KRLD/NBC 5) - A judge is giving a Fort Worth hospital the green light to remove an 11-month-old girl from life support despite her family's protest.
The Thursday morning ruling by the 48th judicial district court says Cook Children's Medical Center will give the family of Tinslee Lewis up to seven days to make a decision on whether to appeal.
Lewis has not left the hospital since her premature birth and has been on a ventilator since she went into respiratory arrest in July, according to hospital staff.
The hospital has maintained that there is nothing more they can do for the little girl, but her parents say Tinslee is a fighter and deserves to be kept alive.
In October, Cook Children's moved to end treatment under Texas' "Ten Day Rule," which is part of the state's Advance Directives Act. The law lets hospitals end treatment for patients if doctors deem that treatment "futile," and an ethics committee agrees. Families are then given ten days to find a different facility that will continue treatment.
The hospital has said Lewis was born prematurely. In addition to the heart defect, the hospital says she has a chronic lung disease and treatment is "prolonging her suffering."
The hospital says it has reached out to 20 other facilities, and each one of them agreed that additional treatment would not help the girl recover.