Posted on 06/16/2005 6:53:51 AM PDT by rhema
. . .People of goodwill may disagree about Terri Schiavo's case. Yet as our society strays from its traditional belief in the essential dignity of every human life, we all must grapple with the implications of the notion that some lives are "not worth living."
Today, assisted suicide is lawful in Oregon. In the Netherlands, according to the New York Times, prosecutors no longer pursue cases against doctors who kill severely impaired babies after birth. The temptation to deal with the defective and incompetent by eliminating them is likely to grow as our society ages. Today, approximately 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. In coming decades, projections suggest that about 40 percent of us will spend roughly 10 years in an infirm, demented condition. The way we deal with this situation will say much about us as a society.
Currently, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is staging an exhibit . . . called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." It examines the idea of "lebensunwertes Leben" -- lives not worthy of life --which the Nazis used to justify their elimination of thousands deemed unfit to live: the retarded, the defective and the seriously ill.
Some German intellectuals championed this idea well before the Nazi era began. A 1920 book, for example, decried "the meticulous care shown to existences which are not just absolutely worthless" -- the disabled and deformed -- "but even of negative value." It called for applying the "healing remedy" of premature death, in order to "eliminat[e] those who were born unfit for life or who later became so."
Today, we must ensure that we ourselves are not tempted to start down this slippery slope --moved by free choice rather than totalitarian edict, and seduced by a shallow notion of "death with dignity."
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
And the Govt. did not keep MS from pulling the plug, her parents filing legal challenges based on MS's behavior did. The Govt. stepped in after the fact because of the controversy surrounding her diagnosis (witnesses that testified she was not PVS and was reacting to stimuli) and the fact that she was not on life support, she was only being fed.
The doctor that testified for MS is well-known to promote euthanization of Alzheimer's patients. Who is next? We should not go down that slippery slope of killing people just because they are an inconvenience or different than us due to a disability. That is how Hitler started.
Simple answer to keep this from happening to you is to make sure your wishes are known to other family members or your physician.
".....I thought the edict that she was BLIND was an especially nice touch. (mega sarcasm)"
- I to, was struck by how much the press wanted to believe that her life was useless and that they were on the right side of the argument when they urged that she should be systematically starved to death. During the press conference nobody asked the doctors whether she could feel or taste or hear. And if she was in a PVS, why did they feel the need to give the "vegetable" morphine and other pain relievers while they killed her?
Also, some reporters seemed to take comfort from the fact that she was not starved to death but she expired from dehydration. If you deprive any human of food and water, scientists will tell you that lack of water will kill you twice as fast as lack of food will. They were just playing with semantics, but somehow the reporters felt this was an important distinction.
While the two doctors who held the press conference started out with a veneer of scientific objectivity, as the meeting went along it became clear to me that they were only there to justify the decision to kill the patient.
My mother died this January of ovarian cancer. She had an operation and chemo treatments 4 years before and became very ill, nearly died from the chemo. When they discovered the cancer was back they said it was inoperable and the only treatment they would recommend was chemo. She refused the chemo. We all honored her wishes. During the last five days of her life she was unable to eat anything. She was only able to drink liquids. The last two days of her life she couldn't even keep the liquid down, but we were still able to moisten her mouth with those little green sponges on sticks. To deny a family the right to give even that little bit of comfort to a loved one is one of the cruelest things I ever heard of. My Mother had a living will in which she wanted no extraordinary means of preserving her life. My mother would not have wanted a feeding tube. We therefore did not have one inserted. If one had been inserted I believe to remove it would have been murder.
This is a different issue then: you think people should never be allowed to remove life support or create living wills. Even if you are completely 100% brain dead. My point is that the marriage contract should assume the medical proxy contract.
We should not go down that slippery slope of killing people just because they are an inconvenience or different than us due to a disability. That is how Hitler started.
I would argue that this is a great reason to keep the government out of the decision and leave it to husband and wife. There are other slippery slopes, technology is making it increasingly possible to keep more and more permanently damaged people alive. That is a slope we will also have to face. We may end out with tens of millions of 130 year old stroke victims who have been on life support despite being brain dead for 50 years.
Owl_Eagle
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
It wasn't so much that you are White, but the fact that you are Scottish AND Baltic; Mr McKasparaitis.
Glad to be of service!
Your wife can have exactly what she wishes if she puts it in writing.
Owl_Eagle
(If what I just wrote makes you sad or angry,
The state already does make those decisions though.
Have you heard about the Scott Thomas situation in Jacksonville?
Because a marriage vow alone doesn't cut it, huh?
Really. You do not know what goes on behind closed doors. I've seen too much in my life. Not only my uber-religious Catholic aunt, but evangelicals have told me that my marriage was broken in the eyes of God. In fact, my aunt told me that what my ex did to me, invalidated the marriage not only in the Church, but also the state.
I would think both Zenalyte and I are conservative, but we do recognize when a marriage is no longer a marriage. Certain behaviors and actions invalidate a marriage. In Terri's case, she started thinking about getting a divorce, because for some reason her marriage was iretrievably broken. I know how families like hers feel about divorce, because I grew up in one. The deal breaker is adultery and physical abuse of the other spouse/children.
Bottom line: if there are no machines keeping a person alive, they are not brain dead. So the only solution is to give that person a fatal injection, or the more merciful solution of starvation and dehydration. /sarcasm
Food, medicine, and water, do not make a "dead" person stay alive.
Imo, you are a troll and an idiot.
Actually it wasn't just conservatives who said it was wrong to dehydrate and starve Terri.
There was a lesbian disabled rights activist who was on MSNBC during the time before Terri died (wish I recalled her name but she was blonde and neatly groomed and femininely dressed), there was a lesbian in a wheelchair at the hospice vigil, a wiccan at the hospice vigil.
There were also some democrats against it or they wouldn't have voted for the bill that issued congressional subpoenas for Terri, MS, and others just before she died. Florida almost passed bills that would have saved her life and it was because there were a lot of liberals who voted for it.
Going back to what I was telling you about my Mother. We honored her wishes. They were in writing and she was terminal. However, if my stepfather was the only one saying that she wanted no extraordinary means of preserving her life, while he had a tootsie on the side with whom he had had 2 illegitimate and was the sole heir to her estate, you can bet I would have interfered in the marriage vow. As it was my stepfather was completely faithful to her, took wonderful care of her and tried harder than any of us to get her to take treatment. A marriage vow between a faithless husband and a helpless wife does not deserve the respect you are demanding.
If they are one flesh in the way you suggest (as opposed to God's meaning), when one dies, so does the other. So, where are Michael's ashes?
You can call them "one flesh," but what you have described is owner and property. Even property owners have certain responsibilities and limitations. You can own a dog, but you're not allowed to starve and dehydrate it to death.
When a man and woman are one flesh in the way God intended, one does not kill the other. God intended the bond between husband and wife to go much deeper than the superficial set of circumstances you have laid out.
I've been consistently asking the question on this thread if my wife could make that decision for me. And I've been consistently told that she can only if we have made two covenants: one for marriage, another for a living will. Otherwise it becomes the government's business and not my ours. That is wrong.
My wife and I trust each other to make these decisions for each other. Does that mean we are each other's property?
I guess that's why conservatives want a Federal Marriage Amendment. /sarcasm>
Scenario A: She pulls the tube, five years later she meets someone new and starts a new family.
Scenario B: The courts don't let her pull the tube. My body stays alive for decades. Now when she meets someone new five years later it is called adultery. But I don't want my wife to put her life on hold for decades while she fights a legal battle.
A marriage license is not a permit to kill. If one spouse becomes incapacitated and must rely on the other spouse, that doesn't mean that the stronger spouse now owns the disabled spouse. It doesn't work that way.
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