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.
we need people like Joe Ford front and center.
Following is email I sent to editor of Crimson...
"KUDOS...
This is a must read.
Hats off - and hand on heart - for Joe Ford.
We need more focus on courageous people like this. America wakes up now, or we all may have our worth for breathing decided by judges and ethic committees - and self appointed angels of death."
Very sobering article. Thanks.
Bingo.
I often tell pro-aborts that, since they believe that some unborn children would be better off dead rather than being born with Downs Syndrome or being born into a life of poverty, they should murder all those living lives of poverty or living with Downs Syndrome.
Unfortunately, it looks like they now are.
You gotta be kidding me. Bleepin' media!
Thanks for your story.
ping
**************
You must be an optimist. I haven't seen much in the way of a change in opinion from the "right to die" side, so I'm not terribly hopeful.
Great article-thanks for posting it.
Be very afraid.
Wow, was I ever wrong. I am 54 years old, so I have been wrong for a very long time, and I am ashamed of my naivete. The Clintons taught me some very nasty things about too many of my fellow citizens in the U.S. and even the world. This case has taught me even worse things. I have close relatives who are absolutely certain that they are good people (even far better than most) and who absolutely can't wait for Terri to die.
The Judeo-Christian ethic, so derided by the left, and by the relatives I have cited, desperately needs a revival in the country and Europe. I once read someplace that the Old Testament was the first instance in world history of a written ethic that often stood up for the little guy against power. That standing up for the weak was not a common value before then.
Nowadays, the only powerless people that the left stands up for is whatever group is fashionable at any given time. Leftist compassion is very, very selective, entirely political, and often aimed at those who don't even particularly need it.
Nazism was discussed factually and in an entirely appropriate historical context in this article. The moral lessons of Nazism in this regard are blatantly and painfully obvious.
No one was called a Nazi in the article that I saw. You were entirely out of line to say what you said. It was a twisted recounting of the "truth" as only the lamestream press could have done. Congratulations!
Nope...
Doctors for Michael Schiavo have said that an MRI and PET are not necessary for Terri because PVS is primarily a “clinical” diagnosis, that is, one arrived at on the basis of examination of the patient, rather than by relying on tests. And the neurologists I have spoken to agree on the clinical nature of the diagnosis, while insisting that advanced tests nonetheless are a necessary part of it. But the star medical witness for Michael Schiavo, Dr. Ronald Cranford of the University of Minnesota, has repeatedly dismissed calls for MRI testing, and his opinion has prevailed.
Dr. Cranford was the principal medical witness brought in by Schiavo and Felos to support their position that Terri was PVS. Judge Greer was obviously impressed by Cranford’s résumé: Cranford travels throughout the country testifying in cases involving PVS and brain impairment. He is widely recognized by courts as an expert in these issues, and in some circles is considered “the” expert on PVS. His clinical judgment has carried the day in many cases, so it is relevant to examine the manner in which he arrived at his judgment in Terri’s case. But before that, one needs to know a little about Cranford’s background and perspective: Dr. Ronald Cranford is one of the most outspoken advocates of the “right to die” movement and of physician-assisted suicide in the U.S. today.
In published articles, including a 1997 op-ed in the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune, he has advocated the starvation of Alzheimer’s patients. He has described PVS patients as indistinguishable from other forms of animal life. He has said that PVS patients and others with brain impairment lack personhood and should have no constitutional rights. Perusing the case literature and articles surrounding the “right to die” and PVS, one will see Dr. Cranford’s name surface again and again. In almost every case, he is the one claiming PVS, and advocating the cessation of nutrition and hydration.
When Minnesota policeman Sgt. David Mack was shot in the line of duty in 1979, Dr. Ronald Cranford diagnosed his patient as being in a "persistent vegetative state," never to regain "cognitive, sapient functioning." Dr. Cranford was ready to end his patient's life, but 20 months after the shooting, Sgt. Mack regained consciousness and nearly all of his mental ability.
In 1989, a group of physicians published a report in the New England Journal of Medicine in which they concluded that it would be morally acceptable for doctors to give patients suicide information and a prescription for deadly drugs so they can kill themselves. Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the authors of the report, publicly acknowledged that this is "the same as killing the patient."
This guy is one sick puppy.
A man was born in the 1800s in Germany. When he emmigrated to the US before the turn of the century, he almost was turned away because he was 4 foot 3 inches, humpbacked, and his face was swollen from an illness.
This man was Charles Proteus Steinmetz, the man who unleashed the power of alternating current and made the electrical age we live in possible, truly revolutionizing the modern world. He held over 200 patents at the time of his death.
I read his story as a child and it has stuck with me ever since. The notion that physical perfection is required for a worthwhile life is betrayed by his story, and the stories of people like Stephen Hawking, Christy Brown, John Merrick, and numerous others. More than that, who knows what greatness such adversity can breed? The eugenics movement may be destroying the very qualities that can raise the quality of human culture.
Well said.
excellent idea
I saw this guy on Scarborough last night -he is one evil dude....
Q1: If you knew a woman who was pregnant, and she had 8 kids already, three who were deaf, two who were blind, one mentally retarded, and she had syphilis; would you recommend that she have an abortion?
If you said yes, you just killed Beethoven.
Actually Dr Cranford (aka Dr Death) was one of two "expert witness" doctors chosen by Michael Schiavo to present his position in the 2002 appeal where Terri's condition was supposedly reevaluated by a 5 doctor panel. The other Schiavo pick being Dr Melvin ("I don't need to see the patient to make a diagnosis") Greer.
Each spent 30-45 minutes total with Terri.
The judge's personal choice and a heavy influence on his decision to deny Terri therapy and life, was a Dr Peter Bambakidis from Cleveland...who had never testifed in such a proceeding.
It would MOST interesting and curious to determine how Judge Greer came to know of and select Dr Bambakidis, who was supposed to be a neutral guardian, not affliated with either Michael or Terri's family.
To date, the only known Bambakidis tie to Pinellas county Florida is that the good doctor's brother Gust was an officer in a national Greek fraternal group to which also belonged...............George Felos, Michael's attorney.
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