Posted on 10/08/2007 3:40:18 PM PDT by wagglebee
Milan, Italy (LifeNews.com) -- An Italian court has denied a request by a disabled woman's father to remove her feeding tube and authorize her death by starvation and dehydration. Eluana Englaro has been a coma for 15 years after an automobile accident seriously injured her and, this year, her father asked a Milan court for permission to remove her feeding tube.
This isn't the first time Englaro's case had been in court.
In April 2005, the Italian Supreme Court confirmed a lower court ruling to keep her feeding tube in place.
That case had also been brought by Englaro's father, who believes that she would have preferred to die. The court rejected the argument because there was no specific evidence on Englaro's views of life and death.
In addition, the court's opinion stated that to remove the tube required, "valuations of life and death that are rooted in concepts of an ethical or religious nature, which are extrajudicial."
The Italian case has drawn comparisons to that of Terri Schiavo, the disabled American woman whose ex-husband won permission from the court to take her life.
It also hearkens to Piergiorgio Welby, a euthanasia activist afflicted with muscular-dystrophy who had a doctor kill him in a euthanasia bid that is still under investigation.
FEEDING TUBES ARE NOT TORTURE DEVICES.
We should be careful not to demonize feeding tubes. They are not horrid torture devices. Sometimes, premature babies and children need them. There are portable feeding tubes like back packs called G-tubes. They are not scary looking and should not be looked upon as objects of torture. They save lives, sustain life and many times after therapy, can be tossed aside.
For anyone interested, here's Terri's Foundation w/other links that may prove helpful.
http://terrisfight.org/
Judge George Greer forbade swallowing tests for TERRI SCHINDLER SCHIAVO even though she could swallow her saliva. He said,"The law of the case is that she will die."
Chilling crime, wasn't it? A judge citing laws he's been paid to follow instead of FOLLOWING the Florida Statutes making what they did to Terri a FELONY MURDER, said statute is on my profile page.
Web sites for all: www.judgegeorgegreer.com (more than Greer here) and www.michaelschiavo.com or .org (google it).
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57351
If we give her the most modest decent care a human being deserves, she may slumber or she may die, or she may recover to some extent, who knows?
If you're a regular reader of this kind of thread, you know that there are instances reported, I would say about monthly, of people waking up from comas of long duration.
The science of mind and consciousness is incompletely understood, to say the least.
It is not expensive to supply nutrition and fluids with a feeding tube.. It costs about as much as eating 3 meals a day at McDonalds, choosing the cheapest selections on the menu.
She may not be living the life you or I would prefer, but it's the only life she has. Why should she be forced by those more powerful, to die of hunger and thirst? Why? Simply for her father's belief (or yours) that she should be dead?
Such would be the argument of the tyrant. Such a death would negate, not this woman's humanity, but our own.
The actual “food” they pump into this body may be a trivial expense but the “cost” of providing care 24x7 is nothing trivial.
Just out of morbid curiousity, what is your criteria for deciding who should have food and water? I only ask because your statement have a rather unsettling familiarity to them.
Translation:
This person suffering from hereditary
defects costs the people 60,000
Reichmarks during his lifetime. People,
that is your money. Read 'New People'."
Excellent point! Elie Wiesel wrote that it was not the Jewish people who faced extinction during the Holocaust so much as it was that morality faced extinction.
The local Home Hospice Service (paid for by Medicare) sent one CNA to our home to bathe him daily, which took 20 minutes. We (my husband and I) changed his undies, shifted him around to prevent bedsores, turned on the radio to his favorite classical music station (while he could still hear), and so forth. We also fed him nutritious liquids with a 20 cc syringe (no needle) orally, and ice cream with a spoon.
The "bother" was comparable to care and feeding of the tropical fish in my kid's aquarium.
It's just a matter of common decency. It's what human beings do.
Terri was never divorced and never had an ex-husband. Crappy journalism.
The state alone has the legal power of death and guards that power jealously. It’s really the state’s only power (violence) so they won’t give it up even though they might lose it through revolution that would kick the state out also.
You’re right, if Terri’s estranged, adulterous husband had divorced her she would be alive today.
So then, if the cost of caring for someone is "not trivial," are you saying that human life is "trivial"?
Who gets to decide? If someone wealthy is hospitalized and his family determines that they can get an extra hundred thousand dollars or so by "speeding up" death, should they be allowed to do so?
Speak of the devil...
A godless freeper is an oxymoron.
And a FReeper who makes such statements and then won’t respond to questions about them is in all likelihood a troll!
Some people who love the dark scurry away when the light is turned on.
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