Posted on 03/29/2005 5:42:30 AM PST by Tirian
“Misery can only be removed from the world by painless extermination of the miserable.” —a Nazi writer quoted by Robert J. Lifton in The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide
The case of Terri Schiavo has been framed by the media as the battle between the “right to die” and pro-life groups, with the latter often referred to as “right-wing Christians.” Little attention has been paid to the more than twenty major disability rights organizations firmly supporting Schiavo’s right to nutrition and hydration. Terri Schindler-Schiavo, a severely disabled woman, is being starved and dehydrated to death in the name of supposed “dignity.” Polls show that most Americans believe that her death is a private matter and that her removal from a feeding tube—a low-tech, simple and inexpensive device used to feed many sick and disabled people—is a reasonable solution to the conflict between her husband and her parents over her right to life.
The reason for this public support of removal from ordinary sustenance, I believe, is not that most people understand or care about Terri Schiavo. Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead. To put it in a simpler way, many Americans are bigots. A close examination of the facts of the Schiavo case reveals not a case of difficult decisions but a basic test of this country’s decency.
Our country has learned that we cannot judge people on the basis of minority status, but for some reason we have not erased our prejudice against disability. One insidious form of this bias is to distinguish cognitively disabled persons from persons whose disabilities are “just” physical. Cognitively disabled people are shown a manifest lack of respect in daily life, as well. This has gotten so perturbing to me that when I fly, I try to wear my Harvard t-shirt so I can “pass” as a person without cognitive disability. (I have severe cerebral palsy, the result of being deprived of oxygen at birth. While some people with cerebral palsy do have cognitive disability, my articulation difference and atypical muscle tone are automatically associated with cognitive disability in the minds of some people.)
The result of this disrespect is the devaluation of lives of people like Terri Schiavo. In the Schiavo case and others like it, non-disabled decision makers assert that the disabled person should die because he or she—ordinarily a person who had little or no experience with disability before acquiring one—“would not want to live like this.” In the Schiavo case, the family is forced to argue that Terri should be kept alive because she might “get better”—that is, might be able to regain or to communicate her cognitive processes. The mere assertion that disability (particularly cognitive disability, sometimes called “mental retardation”) is present seems to provide ample proof that death is desirable.
Essentially, then, we have arrived at the point where we starve people to death because he or she cannot communicate their experiences to us. What is this but sheer egotism? Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, this is obviously an attempt to play God.
Not Dead Yet, an organization of persons with disabilities who oppose assisted suicide and euthanasia, maintains that the starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo will put the lives of thousands of severely disabled children and adults at risk. (The organization takes its name from the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which a plague victim not dying fast enough is hit over the head and carted away after repeatedly insisting he is not dead yet.) Not Dead Yet exposes important biases in the “right to die” movement, including the fact that as early as 1988, Jack Kevorkian advertised his intention of performing medical experimentation (“hitherto conducted on rats”) on living children with spina bifida, at the same time harvesting their organs for reuse.
Besides being disabled, Schiavo and I have something important in common, that is, someone attempted to terminate my life by removing my endotracheal tube during resuscitation in my first hour of life. This was a quality-of-life decision: I was simply taking too long to breathe on my own, and the person who pulled the tube believed I would be severely disabled if I lived, since lack of oxygen causes cerebral palsy. (I was saved by my family doctor inserting another tube as quickly as possible.) The point of this is not that I ended up at Harvard and Schiavo did not, as some people would undoubtedly conclude. The point is that society already believes to some degree that it is acceptable to murder disabled people.
As Schiavo starves to death, we are entering a world last encountered in Nazi Europe. Prior to the genocide of Jews, Gypsies, and Poles, the Nazis engaged in the mass murder of disabled children and adults, many of whom were taken from their families under the guise of receiving treatment for their disabling conditions. The Nazis believed that killing was the highest form of treatment for disability.
As the opening quote suggests, Nazi doctors believed, or claimed to believe, they were performing humanitarian acts. Doctors were trained to believe that curing society required the elimination of individual patients. This sick twisting of medical ethics led to a sense of fulfillment of duty experienced by Nazi doctors, leading them to a conviction that they were relieving suffering. Not Dead Yet has uncovered the same perverse sense of duty in members of the Hemlock Society, now called End-of-Life Choices. (In 1997, the executive director of the Hemlock Society suggested that judicial review be used regularly “when it is necessary to hasten the death of an individual whether it be a demented parent, a suffering, severely disabled spouse or a child.” This illustrates that the “right to die” movement favors the imposition of death sentences on disabled people by means of the judicial branch.)
For an overview of what “end-of-life choices” mean for Schiavo, I refer you to the Exit Protocol prepared for her in 2003 by her health care providers (available online at http://www.cst-phl.com/050113/sixth.html). In the midst of her starvation, Terri will most likely be treated for “pain or discomfort” and nausea which may arise as the result of the supposedly humane process of bringing about her death. (Remember that Schiavo is not terminally ill.) She may be given morphine for respiratory distress and may experience seizures. This protocol confirms what we have learned from famines and death camps: death by starvation is a horrible death.
This apparently is what it means to have “rights” as a disabled person in America today.
Joe Ford ’06 is a government concentrator in Currier House.
And this case has vastly increased that sentiment.
Yes. Bumper stickers, too. Maybe an annual award.
Can't believe this was published in the Crimson.
yes and no. there has and will be a lot of soul searching going on these past 11 days and beyond.
I, for one, wonder what sort of moral outrage was expressed when Roe V. Wade passed; this case is obviously the natural outcome of such legalized, barbaric brutality. While this will galvanize the pro death people, it will also galvanize the normal human beings around us and there will be many changes of heart.
People who have avoided having to think about this sort of thing for years are being forced to.
I will say that this is the darkest week in my life; I was too young to even be aware of Roe, but that must have been every bit as dark. I'm sure we've been on borrowed time as a civilized people since that day.
May God grant us repentence, beginning with Judge Greer.
FReeper Registered of the Sore Loserman fame is probably the best helper in that regard.
Now this is a person I'd like to see on O'Reilly or Hannity. I don't know if he is able to speak well in public, due to his condition, but he has a very important message.
Cranford is a member of the board of directors of the Choice in Dying Society, which promotes doctor-assisted suicide and euthanasia. He was also a featured speaker at the 1992 national conference of the Hemlock Society. The group recently changed its name to End of Life Choices.
In 1997, Cranford wrote an opinion piece in the Minneapolis Star Tribune titled: "When a feeding tube borders on barbaric." "Just a few decades ago cases of brain death, vegetative state, and locked-in syndrome were rare," he wrote. "These days, medicine's 'therapeutic triumphs' have made these neurologic conditions rather frequent. For all its power to restore life and health, we now realize, modern medicine also has great potential for prolonging a dehumanizing existence for the patient."
He explained that while landmark legal cases like those of Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan demonstrated it was "sensible to stop treatment in patients lingering in permanent vegetative states," it was now time to look beyond those cases.
"The United States has thousands or tens of thousands of patients in vegetative states; nobody knows for sure exactly how many," he wrote. "But before long, this country will have several million patients with Alzheimer's dementia. The challenges and costs of maintaining vegetative state patients will pale in comparison to the problems presented by Alzheimer's disease." The answer, he suggested, was physician-assisted suicide.
In recent years, medical ethics and the law have been twisted in frightening ways. Food and water have been reclassified as "medical treatments" if they’re administered "artificially." Dr. Ronald Cranford has even testified in court that spoon-feeding may be classed as "artificial," presumably because helping people to eat is somehow unnatural. < /snip>
Dr. Ronald Cranford was a member of the board of the former Euthanasia Society of America, which eventually merged with Partnership for Caring. Partnership for Caring lists Mary Labyak as a current member of their Board of Directors; she is also the CEO of the hospice where Terri Schiavo lives. Both George Felos and Barbara Sheen Todd have served on the Board of Directors for that same hospice; Mr. Felos was in fact the Chairman of the Board until Terri Schiavo was moved there. Mrs. Todd serves as a Pinellas County commissioner. Judge George Greer served with her for eight years; it is he who has ordered Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube removed. He also appointed a supposedly "neutral" neurologist, Dr. Peter Bambakidis of Ohio, to break the tie between doctors who disagreed about Terri’s diagnosis. Dr. Bambakidis had never before testified in a case like Terri’s, but his brother and George Felos have both served as officers in the American Hellenic Education Progressive Association.< snip >
Dr. Cranford has been an instrumental force in redefining the determination of death. Death was once defined as the time when the heart permanently stopped beating. Through Dr. Cranford’s activism, it was changed to coincide with the cessation of brain waves. The motivation for this redefinition was so that human organs would survive the death of the patient and be available for transplant.
Hide granny in the fruit cellar, they are coming for Alzheimer's patients next.
Thank you for posting this.
...good reading.
What a brilliant and well-put statement!
Thanks for the post. Thanks.
You are so right, and what a good essay.
But as if there weren't enough to be distressed about in this, I'd add the number of FReepers who opendly defend her starvation-torture-death, plus those who so cleverly say "Yawn" or other dismissive jabs at the issue. I'd assume FReepers are, on average, better-informed and more independently thoughtful that many Americans. But the prevalence of apologists for the culture of death (can you name them? I can) here is discouraging.
What a guy.
This is William Nathaniel, Day 2. He was born at 28 weeks gestation.
Will was born as deep purple as an eggplant. Fortunately, he was born at a hospital that is possibly the best in the country for premature babies and does not seem to embrace a culture of death, and after a long road, is a fine healthy boy with only minor problems.
When we took him and his twin in for their developmental checkup with the same hospital, the same doctor who headed the NICU and who attended Will's birth gave us a diagnosis of CP. He did this after what we consider to be a very cursory examination done by two therapists (who didn't seem to allow for the fact that he's farsighted, and who spent much more time examining his more advanced twin first), who then handed him their report for review-- no personal exam, and yet gave an absolute prognosis of little chance for improvement to a normal level.
While we liked this doctor, my wife and I left their clinic in a dander. We had seen their cursory examination at the last visit, when Will was again given low marks. Yet, the therapists who see him several times a week were agast at a diagnosis of CP-- one even said 'If it is, it has to be the mildest case I've ever seen.'
I don't have much faith in the certainty of doctors when it comes to neurological issues, particularly when they issue an absolute diagnosis. Too many times they've been proved wrong, in whole or in part, and all doctors are all too human.
They are already doing it, ask around. It just doesn't make the news.
good one for a ping
Your please resuscitate bracelet could be a moneymaker. It seems to me that people only write living wills when they want to express a wish NOT to be kept alive by artificial or heroic means. Therefore, in the absence of a living will, one must assume the person wants to be kept alive. I have never yet heard of a living will expressing a desire to use all means available, but I guess they will be a coming feature.
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