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"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

Dr. Ronald Cranford

In published articles, including a 1997 op-ed in the Minneapolis–St. Paul Star Tribune, he has advocated the starvation of Alzheimer’s 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. Cranford’s name surface again and again. In almost every case, he is the one claiming PVS, and advocating the cessation of nutrition and hydration.

Dr. Ronald Cranford, is on the board of the Euthanasia Society of America, has ties to the Hemlock Society and even advocates denial of spoon-feeding for the disabled.

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advocated denying even that, saying that even spoon-feeding constituted “medical treatment” that could be licitly withdrawn.

Dr. Cranford seems to have a knack for finding PVS. Cranford also diagnosed Robert Wendland as PVS. He did so in spite of the fact that Wendland could pick up specifically colored pegs or blocks and hand them to a therapy assistant on request. He did so in spite of the fact that Wendland could operate and maneuver an ordinary wheelchair with his left hand and foot, and an electric wheelchair with a joystick, of the kind that many disabled persons (most famously Dr. Stephen Hawking) use. Dr. Cranford dismissed these abilities as meaningless. Fortunately for Wendland, the California supreme court was not persuaded by Cranford's assessment.

Robert Wendland should die so that his family can "be allowed to live their lives," Dr. Ronald Cranford, a Minnesota neurologist and bioethicist, testified recently in the Stockton courtroom of Superior Court Judge Bob McNatt. The chosen method of death? Intentional dehydration and starvation.

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