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April 7, 2008 - It’s more common than you might think: people who were thought to be dead and now are healthy. Do we dare make the judgment on who lives and who dies?
In the Declaration of Independence, "life" is listed as a right--and is listed first. But some have attempted to change the meaning of this word, to suit their own purposes and agendas. Nobody told them the Declaration couldn’t be changed, but many hospitals, lawyers, legislators, and even clergy not only believe it can be changed, but have changed its meaning for their own purposes.
Sometimes people are told they will never recover from a serious injury, or their life is no longer worth living. Others are in constant pain. Still others may be thought to be in a 'comatose' or 'permanent vegetative state'. Faced with these circumstances some in authority believe it is not only okay, but prudent, to put an end to life when confronted with these circumstances. Have you ever noticed that patients are only told this when they can’t respond? And their closest relatives are complicit with the urge to put them "down"?
Here are a just a few of the recent cases in the news about people though to be beyond hope and targets of euthanasia.
1) From June of 2007 - Jan Grzewski was a Polish railway worker who was hospitalized after an injury at work and remained in a coma; doctors found cancer in his brain and predicted he would not recover; after 19 years he spontaneously woke up and talked about memories of when he was in a coma.
2) From September of 2007 – A Venezualian named Carlos Camejo was declared dead after a highway accident, and was sent to a morgue; he woke up in excruciating pain while medical examiners started their autopsy; examiners determined something was amiss when the body started bleeding.
3) From October of 2007 - Jesse Ramirez, from Phoenix, AZ, was considered fatally injured when his SUV crashed into a pottery store; his wife made the decision to pull his feeding tube out and Jesse went 6 days without food or water; all had prepared for his aforementioned death; shortly after hospice officials reported that Jesse was indeed awake and alert; he was transferred to a rehab center and put into recovery.
4) From February of 2008 – The relatives of a 65 year old Minnesota woman named Raleane Kupferschmidt, were told by doctors she was brain dead with no brain activity, and that she would not recover; a CT scan revealed she had suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage a month earlier; doctors had removed her breathing tube and were waiting for her to die; but she began sucking on an ice cube and began to mouth words; later she exclaimed "God’s not done with me yet."
5) In March of 2008 - A girl named Haleigh Poutre from Boston, MA was so brutally beaten 2 years ago by her adoptive parents she was left in a coma not expected to revive; a CAT scan revealed a subdural hematoma (blood on surface of brain); as a ward of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, Haleigh was to have all life support removed after only 6 days; the court decided to euthanize her, and shortly thereafter she began breathing on her own; her feeding tube was left in and she has recovered most of her cognitive abilities.
If you do a little bit of digging you will find that these five cases are actually only tips of the iceberg of people coming back from an assumed death over the past few months. They are only a partial list of those considered dead for all practical purposes. How many more were there like these five that were actually euthanized that really weren’t dead. How many each month… each year? Did their loved ones not hear their cries for life? Was their feeding tube removed without knowing what would really happen in several years, months, or days? Were they even given a feeding tube?
Pope Benedict XVI recently stated that euthanasia "appears as one of the more alarming symptoms of the culture of death..." Don’t we remember Pope John Paul II taking sustenance through a feeding tube as he waved to onlookers through his upper window at the Vatican days before his death?
It’s easy to make the judgment that the existing life is not worth living, and opt for the death. One knows that many, who are not able to communicate in any way, are silently pleading to their killers to be kept alive. Life was started by God. It’s not ours to take. One only need to look to the Netherlands to know that this mentality, this ideology, of "playing God" will come back to bite us. And the bite may not only be physical, but could have spiritual consequences.
The Euthanasia Temptation: Those Who were Thought Dead might be Alive
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