Let Lauren Live!

ChristtheKingMaine ^ | May 7, 2008 | Judie Brown

[8mmMauser]

LAUREN RICHARDSON - YOU CAN HELP!
By Judie Brown

It has been a source of ongoing sadness to read of the difficulties Lauren Richardson’s father has had over the course of the past several months. For those of you who are not familiar with her case, Lauren overdosed on heroin on August 28, 2006. She suffered oxygen deprivation and, as a result of the overdose, is now in a coma and unable to speak out for herself. At the time of the overdose, Lauren was expecting a baby. Her parents honored what they knew would have been her wish and did all they could to keep her healthy and comfortable until the child was born. Today, though Lauren may not be aware of it, she is the mother of Ember Grace, who was born in February 2007.

Since the birth of her daughter, Lauren remains unable to speak of her concerns, but she has a loving father who is doing all he can to protect her from suffering the same fate as Terri Schiavo. However, Lauren’s mother, who has been named her legal guardian, is sadly not of the same opinion and is working with attorneys to pressure the courts to permit Lauren’s starvation.

Lauren’s father has kept hope alive, even at times when there appeared to be no hope in human terms. Lauren’s father is a man of hope in Christ and is dedicated to spending every breath he has on defending Lauren, regardless of what it might cost him in physical exhaustion and worldly goods. The most recent update for those concerned about Lauren tells us the following:

We struggle at times as we seek to share with the public the details of what is happening with Lauren because of the disagreement we have with Lauren’s mother. We cannot understand her reasoning in refusing a path of hope, healing and restoration for Lauren and insisting on causing her death by withholding food and water from her. The issue in Lauren’s case is the eternal truth that all people, no matter what their medical condition, bear the image of God and deserve basic care and an opportunity to be restored to health.

Bobby Schindler, Terri Schiavo’s brother, has written about Lauren in an editorial earlier this year, "False Compassion," and is working closely with Lauren’s father in order to provide expertise that he is uniquely qualified to share during a trying time like this.

There are many links on the Life for Lauren web site that will assist you in tracking this case and learning who is supporting Lauren’s ongoing care and who is opposing it. More importantly, there is something you can do to express your concerns.

ACTION NEEDED NOW

The governor of Delaware, Ruth Ann Minner, is being asked by pro-life Americans across this nation to intervene in this case in order to save Lauren from what many fear is an imminent court order dictating that Lauren be starved and dehydrated to death. I am asking you to be one of those who communicates your passionate belief that Lauren’s life is sacred and deserves to be protected from those who would order her death. The governor’s e-mail address is governor.minner@state.de.us.

Further, it would mean a great deal to Lauren’s father, Randy, if you sent him a copy of your e-mail to Governor Ruth Ann Minner. Randy’s e-mail address is Lifeforlauren@aol.com. 

During a recent visit to Anchorage, Alaska where Bobby Schindler was invited to speak, he told a reporter from The Catholic Anchor, "Once we accept that killing is an acceptable answer to human suffering, we lose any type of parameters. Euthanasia is a form of abandonment. It is not compassion."

Truer words were never spoken. As I frequently tell people who argue that we pro-lifers are being heartless and cruel for fighting to defend the rights of a "hopeless case," "God is the author of every human being’s life, and He has never given permission to a single one of us to arbitrarily rob another human being of life for any reason including disability or illness."

As Flannery O’Connor once wrote on the subject of false compassion, "In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. And tenderness leads to the gas chamber."

Lauren Richardson is not terminal – she is severely disabled. Lauren Richardson should not be murdered.

Judie Brown is president of American Life League and a member of the Pontifical Academy for Life.

[wagglebee]

Part of my routine just about every weekday morning when I got to my office and checked FR was to read, chuckle and occasionally chime in on the banter between 8mm and T’wit. I still think about it every morning.

Godspeed Tim, I will be forever grateful for your wit, wisdom and devotion.

[wagglebee]

Some people are inconvenient to some people and many of us (not Freepers, Americans in general) seem to believe that is reason enough to kill people.

Unfortunately, this view is held by far too many Americans and more than a few FReepers.

[Dante3]

And that is tragic.
<P?I recall the statement from one of my sociology comments, something like - the measure of the goodness of a society how it treats the children, the elderly, and the disabled and ill.

[floriduh voter]

Believe you me, the euthanazi's would luv to take literally the phrase if "looks could kill". They just want to kill and and why or who doesn't really matter. They HAD to kill Terri though but she's not being forgotten. I don't think the deathbots calculated how many people would keep fighting them and Terri's fight is a movement for many now, not just for one person.

I forgot to listen to Bobby and Suzanne's radio show today. I was admiring my NEW BICYCLE instead. New-used but it's good to have a bicycle in case the power's out and gas won't pump at the station. I think they should add bicycles to the hurricane supply list. I don't think it's on the standard hurricane supply list.

[wagglebee]

They are like vampires, as soon as they kill one victim they are off looking for another. The euthanazis are probably jealous that the abortionists get to kill so many.

[floriduh voter]

They look like vampires too. No rosy cheeks among their ranks. They're a bunch of thuggish ghouls or ghoulish thugs. Take your pick.

unrelated: I'm trying to get an update on horse Big Brown. I think it was too hot and BB just thought, uh, not today, not doin' it.

[floriduh voter]

The Spotted Owl and Heart of Gold are missed too.

[floriduh voter]

This country doesn’t treat anyone well. If the politicians cared at all, they’d do something about gas. It’s the Katrina of our time and they do nothing.

[wagglebee]

I was really disappointed with the race. I think the owner, trainer and jockey were all too cocky. Plus the cracked hoof should have been patched weeks ago, but they waited until yesterday. He did finish last because when it was clear that he was going to lose the jockey reined him in rather than risk injury. One thing is clear though, Big Brown NEVER had it in him to be the “next” Secretariat or Seattle Slew.

Natural well water in Kentucky and many other places in the eastern US is very rich in limestone. However, in the past few decades they have started giving horses regular drinking water and some speculate that this has played a role. Others have suggested that all of the inbreeding has finally started taking a toll.

[wagglebee]

I don’t really remember Heart of Gold, but The Spotted Owl was a dear woman and deeply missed.

[floriduh voter]

They said on abc that Big Brown was on roids before the Preakness. The hoof and the heat would turn any horse into a mule. They’ll only obey to a point. My horse didn’t obey but in that situation, he’d run flat out and then dead stop at the gate into the track. It was frightening to see and it was scary for me. He was too green. After winter, he bucked me off and I gave him bk. That was Western at break neck speed. I wouldn’t want to go through that again but it was exciting at the time.

[floriduh voter]

Alaskan woman in coma. Hubby fights for her vs. docs. Courts rule for her. Names withheld.
http://worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=66381

[floriduh voter]

Correction: Alaskan woman NOT in coma.

[floriduh voter]

Father Pavone.

Those who advocate a "right to die" needn't worry, Pavone said. "You won't miss out on it."

[8mmMauser]

From Slate...an article by Harriet McBryde Johnson as Terri lay dying...

Thanks, Leslie, for the tip.

...........................................

The Terri Schiavo case is hard to write about, hard to think about. Those films are hard to look at. I see that face, maybe smiling, maybe not, and I am reminded of a young woman I knew as a child, lying on a couch, brain-damaged, apparently unresponsive, and deeply beloved—freakishly perhaps but genuinely so—living proof of one family's no-matter-what commitment. I watch nourishment flowing into a slim tube that runs through a neat, round, surgically created orifice in Ms. Schiavo's abdomen, and I'm almost envious. What effortless intake! Due to a congenital neuromuscular disease, I am having trouble swallowing, and it's a constant struggle to get by mouth the calories my skinny body needs. For whatever reason, I'm still trying, but I know a tube is in my future. So, possibly, is speechlessness. That's a scary thought. If I couldn't speak for myself, would I want to die? If I become uncommunicative, a passive object of other people's care, should I hope my brain goes soft and leaves me in peace?

My emotional response is powerful, but at bottom it's not important. It's no more important than anyone else's, not what matters. The things that ought to matter have become obscured in our communal clash of gut reactions. Here are 10 of them:

1. Ms. Schiavo is not terminally ill. She has lived in her current condition for 15 years. This is not about end-of-life decision-making. The question is whether she should be killed by starvation and dehydration.

2. Ms. Schiavo is not dependent on life support. Her lungs, kidneys, heart, and digestive systems work fine. Just as she uses a wheelchair for mobility, she uses a tube for eating and drinking. Feeding Ms. Schiavo is not difficult, painful, or in any way heroic. Feeding tubes are a very simple piece of adaptive equipment, and the fact that Ms. Schiavo eats through a tube should have nothing to do with whether she should live or die.

3. This is not a case about a patient's right to refuse treatment. I don't see eating and drinking as "treatment," but even if they are, everyone agrees that Ms. Schiavo is presently incapable of articulating a decision to refuse treatment. The question is who should make the decision for her, and whether that substitute decision-maker should be authorized to kill her by starvation and dehydration.

4. There is a genuine dispute as to Ms. Schiavo's awareness and consciousness. But if we assume that those who would authorize her death are correct, Ms. Schiavo is completely unaware of her situation and therefore incapable of suffering physically or emotionally. Her death thus can't be justified for relieving her suffering.

5. There is a genuine dispute as to what Ms. Schiavo believed and expressed about life with severe disability before she herself became incapacitated; certainly, she never stated her preferences in an advance directive like a living will. If we assume that Ms. Schiavo is aware and conscious, it is possible that, like most people who live with severe disability for as long as she has, she has abandoned her preconceived fears of the life she is now living. We have no idea whether she wishes to be bound by things she might have said when she was living a very different life. If we assume she is unaware and unconscious, we can't justify her death as her preference. She has no preference.

6. Ms. Schiavo, like all people, incapacitated or not, has a federal constitutional right not to be deprived of her life without due process of law.

7. In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.

8. In other contexts, federal courts are available to make sure state courts respect federally protected rights. This review is critical not only to the parties directly involved, but to the integrity of our legal system. Although review will very often be a futile last-ditch effort—as with most death-penalty habeas petitions—federalism requires that the federal government, not the states, have the last word. When the issue is the scope of a guardian's authority, it is necessary to allow other people, in this case other family members, standing to file a legal challenge.

9. The whole society has a stake in making sure state courts are not tainted by prejudices, myths, and unfounded fears—like the unthinking horror in mainstream society that transforms feeding tubes into fetish objects, emblematic of broader, deeper fears of disability that sometimes slide from fear to disgust and from disgust to hatred. While we should not assume that disability prejudice tainted the Florida courts, we cannot reasonably assume that it did not.

10. Despite the unseemly Palm Sunday pontificating in Congress, the legislation enabling Ms. Schiavo's parents to sue did not take sides in the so-called culture wars. It did not dictate that Ms. Schiavo be fed. It simply created a procedure whereby the federal courts could decide whether Ms. Schiavo's federally protected rights have been violated.

In the Senate, a key supporter of a federal remedy was Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a progressive Democrat and longtime friend of labor and civil rights, including disability rights. Harkin told reporters, "There are a lot of people in the shadows, all over this country, who are incapacitated because of a disability, and many times there is no one to speak for them, and it is hard to determine what their wishes really are or were. So I think there ought to be a broader type of a proceeding that would apply to people in similar circumstances who are incapacitated."

I hope against hope that I will never be one of those people in the shadows, that I will always, one way or another, be able to make my wishes known. I hope that I will not outlive my usefulness or my capacity (at least occasionally) to amuse the people around me. But if it happens otherwise, I hope whoever is appointed to speak for me will be subject to legal constraints. Even if my guardian thinks I'd be better off dead—even if I think so myself—I hope to live and die in a world that recognizes that killing, even of people with the most severe disabilities, is a matter of more than private concern.

Clearly, Congress's Palm Sunday legislation was not the "broader type of proceeding" Harkin and I want. It does not define when and how federal court review will be available to all of those in the shadows, but rather provides a procedure for one case only. To create a general system of review, applicable whenever life-and-death decisions intersect with disability rights, will require a reasoned, informed debate unlike what we've had until now. It will take time. But in the Schiavo case, time is running out.

Not Dead at All...Why Congress was right to stick up for Terri Schiavo.

8mm

[8mmMauser]

More from Harriet McBryde Johnson, this going back to 2003...

Imagine her in conversation with Peter Singer. Thanks again, Leslie. I have shortened this to an excerpt because of its length and also in the interest of conserving bandwidth and global warming and stuff.

........................................

He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.

Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.''

It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.

At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn't. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I'll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.

I have agreed to two speaking engagements. In the morning, I talk to 150 undergraduates on selective infanticide. In the evening, it is a convivial discussion, over dinner, of assisted suicide. I am the token cripple with an opposing view...........................

Unspeakable Conversations

8mm

[8mmMauser]

And now, this comes from Michelle Malkin's Hot Air site...

...........................................

The controversial and colorful advocate for the disabled, Harriet McBryde Johnson, died earlier this week at her Charleston home. Johnson first came to national prominence when she publicly challenged Princeton’s Peter Singer on the ethics of euthanizing profoundly disabled infants, and dedicated her life to improving the quality of life for those in institutions she called the “gulag”:

Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50. …

Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”

Rolling into an auditorium at the College of Charleston on April 22, 2001, Ms. Johnson went to the microphone during a question-and-answer session to confront Peter Singer, a philosopher from Princeton, who was giving a lecture titled “Rethinking Life and Death.” ….

An e-mail exchange followed that encounter in Charleston, leading to an invitation to debate Professor Singer at Princeton on March 25, 2002. Their two encounters were the subject of the 8,000-word Times article, which brought Ms. Johnson considerable attention in the disability rights movement and from the general public.

She also drew “considerable attention” when she argued for Congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo case.   In fact, she gave one of the most dispassionate and logical arguments to stop the efforts by the court to remove Schiavo’s feeding tube, certainly less emotional than many on that side of the debate.  Re-reading it now will recall all of the drama and anger of those days, but Johnson’s example should have served to instruct how the rest of the debate should have been conducted.

Lest anyone think that Johnson was a doctrinaire conservative, one should read the Times’ well-written obituary.  She argued for public financing for home care for the profoundly disabled, calling the nursing-home system a “gulag”.   In 2003, she railed against care facilities where the disabled got parked in front of blaring televisions and ignored by the staff.  “I sometimes dare to dream that the gulag will be gone in a generation or two,” Johnson once wrote.

Johnson always recognized the power of the individual and the spark of the divine in human life.  She never stopped advocating for equality and dignity for those with disabilities of any kind and especially those with severe handicaps.  Johnson maintained a sense of humor and self-deprecating wit that allowed people to see her as the complete person she was.  Harriet McBryde Johnson will be sorely missed in the years to come.

Fausta has more.

Harriet McBryde Johnson, RIP

8mm

[8mmMauser]

From The Passionate Pro-Lifer...

............................................

REMEMBERING THE DAY THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION BEGAN

The Bad Decision
That Started It All

ROBERT P. GEORGE & DAVID L. TUBBS

Forty years ago, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down state laws forbidding the sale, distribution, and use of contraceptives on the basis of a novel constitutional doctrine known as the “right to marital privacy.” At the time, the decision appeared to be harmless.


After all, Griswold simply allowed married couples to decide whether to use contraceptives. But the Supreme Court soon transformed the “right to privacy” (the reference to marriage quickly disappeared) into a powerful tool for making public policy. In Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), the Court changed a right of spouses — justified in Griswold precisely by reference to the importance of marriage — into a right of unmarried adults to buy and use contraceptives. Then, in a move that plunged the United States into a “culture war,” the Court ruled in Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton (1973) that this generalized “right to privacy” also encompassed a woman’s virtually unrestricted right to have an abortion.

More . . .

To hear Jodie Wagner of Pharmacists for Life click here.

Posted by Leslie at 3:32 PM

REMEMBERING THE DAY THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION BEGAN

8mm

[8mmMauser]

This is also covered by Professor Pope and is in a thread by wagglebee. Thanks, Leslie.

A trial can proceed in a lawsuit filed against DeKalb Medical Center for removing an 18-year-old patient from life support against her mother's wishes.

The Georgia Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the lawsuit, meaning a ruling issued last year by the state Court of Appeals stands. That appeals court ruling said the decision to end the life of a patient with no living will and no chance of regaining brain function belongs to families, not hospitals..........

Trial to go forward over hospital's removal of life support

8mm

[8mmMauser]

Sam Golubchuk is on our watch list and we scan for updates each morning. We noted the tantrum over the doctor who wasn't allowed to kill his victim and is now limited to kicking his dog and other releases of frustration. Kill lust is hard to squelch.

Wagglebee has a thread on this guy, Dr. AnAnt Kumar.

Winnipeg, Canada (LifeNews.com) -- A Canadian doctor has quit his job at a hospital rather than treat a severely disabled patient. Samuel Golubchuck is a terminally ill elderly patient undergoing treatment in a Winnipeg hospital's ICU and his doctors want to refuse life-sustaining treatment.

Now, the doctor who wanted to impose his values on Golubchuck by forcing him off respirator and feeding tube has resigned rather than continue treatment.....

Canadian Doctor Quits Working at Hospital Rather Than Treat Disabled Patient

8mm