Posted on 07/27/2005 6:04:09 AM PDT by NYer
Lima, Jul. 26, 2005 (CNA) - The President of the Pontifical Council for Heath Care, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, recalled the Terry Schiavo case this week and said “they killed her” by denying her food and hydration.
According to the cardinal, “Food and hydration are never considered medicine.” “To remove them means euthanasia, it means killing, and so this woman was killed by hunger and starvation. Let’s stop with the euphemisms—they killed her,” he stated.
“Law consists of a rational ordering that seeks the common good and not the common evil,” Cardinal Lozano noted, “but many times there are laws that are called laws but are nothing more than arbitrary norms. In fact, the President of the United States was against this court decision because he had enough sense to realize it was incorrect.”
In today’s world, he stated, there is an abundance of euphemisms to disguise euthanasia. “The dignity of death means that this person has the capacity to reach the fullness of maturity so that upon crossing the threshold he or she does so in full consciousness, blossoming forth completely in the Lord,” the cardinal added.
He also called for advances in palliative care in order to “resolve the problems of pain and so that individuals can be more aware and more united to Christ on the cross, and thus be more conscious of the beginning of the resurrection.”
Likewise, the cardinal pointed out that “a doctor who is not a believer is always a frustrated doctor. The most advanced techniques, the most advanced medicines, are always met at the exit by the ironic laughter of death; on the other hand, the believer says no to death,” he said.
He is the stuff of nightmares. What a coward.
And the world stood by, watching, as each day of Terri's slow starvation went by! No one, not even the President of the United States, could override a county judge's order to kill Terri!!!! This world has gone mad!
Der Gott, der Eisen wachsen ließ,
Der wollte keine Knechte...
It doesn't quite translate, but "The God Who let the iron grow: He wanted no slaves."
The whole hymn (if one may call it that) is HERE
Of course, Arndt WAS referring to Napoleon . . . but this is a bit bloodthirsty for my taste.
Grab your Saebel, your Schwert and your Spiess, and let's go marching!
Btw, for fun, I ran that maxim through a translation program, and "Knechte" came out "farm workers."
According to doc CodeBlueBlog (a radiologist),
"1) It is NOT as bad as the neurologists and bioethicists play it up to be; and,
"2) There are many elderly patients with various levels of mental functioning who have severe atrophy that is difficult to distinguish from Terri Schiavo's atrophy."
In particular, the CT shows nearly total atrophy in the anterior (front) of the brain, but a substantial amount of cortex remaining in the rear of the brain, with networking.* This was confirmed in the autopsy. Dr. Hammesfahr said that this was consistent with the limited but still hopeful brain functions he had observed in Terri when he worked with her.
That one CT probably did more to give people a false impression of Terri's condition than Felos's top ten lies. Whoever posted it invited the whole world to do a medical no-no: diagnosing an unexamined patient.
* How she got such an injury makes fascinating speculation. If her brain injury was due to cardiac arrest, why was only the brain affected and not organs below her neck such as her heart and liver? And why was the damage so much greater in the front of the brain than in the rear? Pressure on the carotid arteries, which feed oxygenated blood to the front of the brain, is one possible answer. Another is a "coup-contra coup" injury which is akin to the "shaken baby syndrome." It's like whiplash. The brain sort of sloshes back, bounces off the back of the skull (minor damage), then smashes hard into the front of the skull with heavy damage.
Briefly, the question of swallowing. Terri certainly could swallow. She swallowed her saliva and didn't drool. Her nurses used to feed her Jello and pudding on the sly (when Michael wasn't around) and said she hugely enjoyed them. Terri's swallowing problem were more like it was dangerous to give her food -- not impossible. If she aspirated any food -- got it down the wrong tube and into her lungs -- it could have caused infection and pneumonia. The Medical Examiner (coroner) noted that she had in fact suffered aspiration pneumonia and retroactively bawled out whoever gave her food by mouth. But I believe the nurses -- Terri's primary caregivers -- knew exactly what they were doing. And after all, this was ten years before her death, when she was in better shape. No telling how she contracted the pneumonia detected in the autopsy.
In any case, it could not have hurt to put some ice chips in her mouth when she was being put to death.
bttt
Close enough. A Knecht to me gives a mental image of a guy in a smock standing in a field, or leading a couple of plow horses.
We know what killing by dehydration/starvation is like...
"[Nancy Cruzan, three days before her death from starvation] turned and looked at me and stared at me with a panicky look, sweating profusely, and the thought I had was, she was thinking, ‘Oh, here’s a policeman, he’ll help me.’ But we weren’t allowed to do that,"...Doug Seneker
Glad they are not forgetting about Terri and what she and her family were put through.
Terri is missed.
She is, she is. God love her.
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