"Dr. Ronald Cranford has even testified in court that spoon-feeding may be classed as "artificial," presumably because helping people to eat is somehow unnatural."
um, so babies shouldn't be fed with a spoon, guess they'll just have to start managing on their own. /sarc off
In published articles, including a 1997 op-ed in the MinneapolisSt. Paul Star Tribune, he has advocated the starvation of Alzheimers patients. He has described PVS patients as indistinguishable from other forms of animal life. He has said that PVS patients and others with brain impairment lack personhood and should have no constitutional rights. Perusing the case literature and articles surrounding the right to die and PVS, one will see Dr. Cranfords name surface again and again. In almost every case, he is the one claiming PVS, and advocating the cessation of nutrition and hydration.
In the cases of Paul Brophy, Nancy Jobes, Nancy Cruzan, and Christine Busalucci, Cranford was the doctor behind the efforts to end their lives. Each of these people was brain-damaged but not dying; nonetheless, he advocated death for all, by dehydration and starvation. Nancy Cruzan did not even require a feeding tube: She could be spoon-fed. But Cranford advocated denying even that, saying that even spoon-feeding constituted medical treatment that could be licitly withdrawn.
What has Wendland, 45, done to deserve such a fate? He went into a coma in September 1993 from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Sixteen months later, he awakened from the coma, paralyzed on one side and unable to walk, talk or swallow well enough to eat. He is physically and cognitively disabled and dependent on others for his care. He is not terminally ill. He is not hooked up to machines. He does require a feeding tube to sustain his life.
Those who seek to end Wendland's life downplay his physical and cognitive abilities. That is because people who are diagnosed as permanently unconscious are being dehydrated in this country, all perfectly legal thanks to several court decisions. Now, "right-to-die" activists such as Cranford who has testified in support of dehydration in most of the nation's major dehydration cases of brain-damaged patients, including that of Nancy Beth Cruzan want to stretch acceptable dehydration to disabled folk with brain damage who are awake and aware. This is the slippery slope in action. http://tinyurl.com/4sylh