Catholic Ping - Come home for Easter and experience God’s merciful love. Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Posted on 02/17/2005 5:54:30 PM PST by amdgmary
On February 14, 2005, disability advocates with Not Dead Yet issued a call for moratorium on the withholding of assisted sustenance and hydration from people diagnosed to be in a persistent vegetative or minimally conscious state.
Citing study findings published in a recent edition of Neurology Magazine, Not Dead Yet’s Stephen Drake stated: "Given the current research regarding brain activity and misdiagnosis, it's a virtual certainty that countless people have been helpless to prevent their own deaths through starvation and dehydration."
The study Drake refers to was reported in the February 8, 2005 edition of the New York Times. The Times noted that: “Thousands of brain-damaged people who are treated as if they are almost completely unaware may in fact hear and register what is going on around them but be unable to respond, a new brain-imaging study suggests.”
The research was conducted with significantly brain-injured (or “minimally conscious”) patients by a team of neuroscientists from New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC. With the use of imaging technology and audio tapes of the patients’ loved ones, scientists were able to record brain activity similar to that of otherwise healthy patients. They reported that the specificity and intricacy of the brain patterns eliminated the possibility of coincidence.
For rather obvious reasons, this has sparked much attention from disability advocates from across the nation.
Indeed, Not Dead Yet has directly called for the same types of testing to be made available to those patients in danger of having assisted nourishment and hydration removed – causing death over the course of many days. In their February press release, they state: “State-of-the-art testing for cognitive activity should be a minimum standard to be applied when someone's death is proposed.”
While all of this may sound reasonable enough to most people, there is a group that would prefer you think it rubbish. They don black robes and, with gavels swinging, have the power to exact a forced death upon the weakest members of our society.
Judges in Florida, specifically Pinellas-Pasco’s Sixth Judicial Circuit, have granted the husband of Terri Schiavo the authority to remove her tube-provided food and fluids in order to terminate her life. The process could take as long as 20 days and will subject the disabled woman (whose true condition is the subject of great dispute) to a ghastly demise. Ms. Schiavo’s husband asserts she is in a persistent vegetative state and would have refused artificial life support based on casual statements he claims she made some 20 years ago.
Disability advocates have long supported Ms. Schiavo’s retained right to receive ordinary care and have argued that labeling a simple gastronomy tube “artificial life support” would immediately and dramatically endanger entire groups of people within the disabled community.
They’re right, of course. But is anyone listening?
Time and again, the parents of Terri Schiavo (Bob and Mary Schindler) have petitioned the courts for the authority to provide her with rehabilitation and therapy. Such measures have been denied for years by Terri’s husband and guardian, Michael Schiavo.
Time and again, the court has refused, steadfast in its opinion that Terri Schiavo exists in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of regaining consciousness or meaningful behavior.
Terri’s parents have given the court evidence in the form of testimony and sworn statements from a number of credible doctors that persistent vegetative state is not a correct diagnosis of their daughter’s condition. At every turn, the court has denied taking such things into consideration. Instead, it relied on the testimony of doctors, who don’t even treat cognitively disabled patients, that Terri just isn’t “in there”.
The court also reviewed videos of Terri, appearing to react quite purposefully to her family and responding to directives, as inconsistent and irreproducible. The doctors who testified on behalf of Terri’s family explained to the court how such behaviors are not consistent with medical and statutory definitions of persistent vegetative state. Sadly, the court chose not to listen.
The consistent failure of the court to remind itself that it is not a body of healthcare practitioners, but a finder of fact, has all but sentenced Terri Schiavo to death. With her, countless others are at immediate risk.
Also in February of 2005, a woman by the name of Sarah Scantlin immerged from a “minimally conscious state” and began speaking with loved ones and caregivers. Though her story is unusual and somewhat bewildering to physicians and laypeople alike, it is not altogether unheard of. Over the years, many individuals thought to be in a coma or a “coma-like” condition have emerged and regained some – if not all - of their abilities. Kate Adamson, Patricia Whitebull and Terry Wallis are only a few of the names we now associate with such medical mysteries. All were diagnosed as comatose or vegetative and all shocked those around them by becoming one with their lives, minds and bodies again.
It is not unreasonable to assume that for each Kate Adamson, Patricia Whitebull or Terry Wallis, there are hosts of other patients in similar states – locked into a bodies that won’t allow them to communicate effectively. Of these incapacitated but aware people, there are many who are in danger of having their lives terminated by a willful act of deprivation.
According to a British medical journal, persistent vegetative state is misdiagnosed nearly 43% of the time. Are we so studiously attempting to enforce someone’s “right to die” that we are neglecting to first ensure that they are still very much among the living?
Imagine being unable to protect yourself and facing a death by the slow and agonizing process of dehydration and starvation. Do we honestly believe that doing such things to others is a humane and compassionate course of action?
With the ongoing progress of image testing and diagnosis procedures for brain-injured patients, there will surely come a day of reckoning when all of us will have to live with the knowledge that living, knowing and feeling human beings were put to their death in the name of some perceived personal dignity. That burden will come to bear most significantly on Florida’s courts and lawmakers as well as those of who accepted the notion that cognitively disabled people are no longer worthy of protection. However, if we sit idly by, we’ll all be just as guilty in the process.
When will WE wake up?
I join with all the others here in prayer for Teri and her loved ones!
Yes, one of the reasons that there is a statute of limitations for many crimes is that the memories of the people involved can get clouded over the years, thus they are not always very credible. It should be no difference here, but Greer has treated these statements by Michael and his family as facts. I wish a jury had been allowed to decide whether or not those were factual statements.
I like that. A statute of limitations should of applied to Michael's "za zam, I just remembered she didn't want to live like this," 7 or 8 years after the 'accident' alone.
If Terri's case were handled by an honest judge, none of this would be an issue because Michael has shown himself to be a liar in enough ways that his words are not credible.
Given that Terri's case is being handled by a judge who will pretend the facts are whatever he needs them to be, regardless of evidence, I don't think such a statute of limitations would have any impact. Michael could claim Terri recovered briefly two weeks ago and said she wanted to die, and Greer would believe her.
I have seen this "mindset" when I lived in New York, on certain days of the week (I won't mention which), when it is forbidden for some religious groups to use anything "mechanical." So, if they want the light switched on or off, they let an ashtray press the switch or tell a child to turn the lights off -- that way gravity "did it," or the innocent child did it and thereby the law wasn't violated.
It seems to me, we have come a long way, perhaps too long, in our quest for human rights, giving in to rationalism instead of mercy, forgetting that only do we not have a right to our own life (because we can't keep it), but we certainly have no right to end anyone else's life deliberately no matter what the process of what "does it".
Deliberate act with the purpose of ending someone's life is -- murder no matter how legal(istic) minds sugarcoat it.
I have included our Catholic brethren with the same petition to pray with us.
I'm praying for her daily and for us as a country that we do not allow her slow and cruel murder.
I agree with everything you have written, which is probably no surprise to this pinged group. That said, your comment put me in mind of something my mother asked me to do when she lay dying, quite young by today's standards, of cancer. About ten days before she died she asked me to get the priest for anointing and communion. Then after he left, she took my hand and said, "Tell the priest to "say the prayers"!" I asked her what prayers. She said he'd know. I did and the priest just looked grave and said to tell my mother he would. After she died he told me they were prayers for a peaceful and easy imminent death. That's just what she had.
Catholic Ping - Come home for Easter and experience God’s merciful love. Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Bump and Prayers for Terri.
Thank you for sharing that. God is merciful.
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