I would like to thank KU Students For Life for bringing Bobby Schindler to campus last week. Please know that those who were there were affected by what he had to say.
For those of you who were not there, I would like to summarize Schindler’s talk. First, although Terri Schiavo’s case was very much a pro-life issue, it was also very much a disability rights issue. Media coverage tended to focus its attention on the support given by pro-life groups, but failed to give adequate coverage to the more than 25 local and national disability rights groups that also supported Schiavo’s family in their fight to keep Terri’s feeding tube intact. The media also tended to focus on the fact that Terri was considered to be in a persistent vegetative state (PVS), a prognosis that is very subjective and misdiagnosed 43 percent of the time, according to Schindler.
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I call what is happening to Andrea "redlining" because that is what it would be called if the same practice were adopted in any other industry. What if banks had "Futile Loan Committees," which looked at the circumstances of poor people, minorities, and homosexuals, and decided that financially backing the advancement of those out of the mainstream of society was not in the corporate best interest? What if insurance agencies had "Futile Policy Committees," exhibiting the same pattern and mindset? Where our money is concerned, we would never allow such an abuse, but where human life is concerned, it is becoming increasingly commonplace. Can one fail to hear the echo of the voice of the recently-beatified "Lion of Muenster," Clemens von Galen, who once thundered from his pulpit in Nazi-riddled Germany:
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