If you can't hear 'em scream; it must not hurt
Mood: Dumbfounded
Listening to: the soothing sounds of city traffic
I’m sure everyone out there in the Great American Wasteland of information overload is just bored to tears with Terri Schiavo's story. Every politician that’s not on knocking on death’s door is bawling to any reporter who’ll listen about how they feel somebody’s rights, somewhere, have been grievously violated. CNN, NBC, ABC and every other three letter news broadcaster in the world has been covering this story as if O.J. went and killed again. Still, with all of these qualified people reporting the facts to us and with all of those honorable politicians telling us how the law lies and how we should feel protected and safe, I feel the need to comment on this woman and her husband’s tragedy.
The first question that becomes more and more glaringly obvious as the Supreme Court hearings and video tapes keep rolling along is; would any of this be happening if Terri Schiavo were indigent? The big questions are supposed to be ‘How can you be sure a loved one will never recover from a coma, severe brain damage, stroke, ect.’ and ‘How much government interference do you want in your "end-of-life" decisions’. Come on now, don’t play…you know that if Terri was some homeless lady in the county hospital there would be no second thoughts about ‘right-to-life’, there defiantly wouldn’t be any special laws passed for her benefit so as to make it illegal to stop using artificial means to keep her alive. If Terri had been from the land of ‘below poverty level’, those would have been almost the exact words her doctors would have used when her husband asked about the possibility of her recovering from her persistent vegetative state. “Sir, we are deeply sorry for your lose, however, the county can not pay to keep anyone alive exclusively through artificial means.”
I’ll confess that I don’t know all of the details of this case and to tell you the truth this part of the story isn’t the part that really gets to me. At some point you get used to the class differences that we have here, I mean, Hell, it could be a whole lot worse. The court ruled in the husbands favor, being as he spent all the money from the lawsuit on her care, what the Hell. Go ahead, dude, and kill her. Again, this isn’t what creeps me out, Lord knows, I wouldn’t want to just exist like a potted fern that needed a diaper change occasionally. I am a firm believer in assisted deaths for people with medical concerns. I’d bet that the late stages of colon cancer hurts like nothing I could imagine, or the last stages of AIDS, when there is no possibility of recovery and even remission doesn’t sound so good anymore. This is when I think that doctors should be able to offer their patients a painless alternative to spending their time daydreaming about when they will die and the pain will be gone. I’m not talking about a walk-in euthanasia clinic like ‘Planned Parenthood’s’ evil, mirrored image twin, where all suicidal, and possibly suicidal people are welcome (without having to notify the parents or guardians). No.
What was it about this story that I thought was so bizarre that I had to share it with my fellow bloggers? When the long arm of the law finally swung Michael Schiavo’s way, it was a done deal for Terri. Her proverbial goose was cooked. The three-judge panel at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta ruled that Michael was within his rights to withdraw the feeding tube from Terri, the result being her death because ‘she never would had wanted to live in this condition’. Okay, I’ll go for that, tell you the truth, neither would I. What I would want though is for my husband to find a better way to kill me that to let me die of dehydration. I mean, we have more respect for stray dogs, at least we gas them. It’s going to take like three days…maybe a much a two weeks, one guy said, for this woman to die. What, no morphine in Florida, because for about five dollars worth you could end this woman’s suffering. I don’t understand this thing at all. I think that everyone wants to pretend that removing the feeing tube isn’t killing her the same as putting a bullet in her brain. The woman already said she wouldn’t want to live under these conditions, the court ruled the husband is within his rights. Why the slow agonizing death of dehydration and starvation, oh, yeah, this is one reason why. Apparently when you go into a coma you build up a tolerance to hunger and since she is in a vegetative anyways chances are she won’t even notice, very slim at best.
Why even risk the slightest chance, let the woman drift off to sleep for Christ’s sake, convicted murders get that much. I have no comprehension how something like this is considered a non-issue. We can file this one in the same folder with ‘Circumcision doesn’t hurt babies; they’re so young they just forget about it’. Uh-huh, let us cut the tip off a grown mans penis, with no anesthesia, and see how long it takes him to forget about it. The name of this folder is… “If you can’t hear ‘em scream, it must not hurt”.
Now that I’m on the topic of euthanasia, I’m going to run with it. It’s one of those topics that hard to get into without sounding like you might need a shrink to get your head straight. That may be the case, even so, I’m going to share some of the fascinating tidbits I dredged up about doing yourself in…
Amazingly enough, there are rules to suicide...
Five Individually Necessary Conditions for Candidacy for Voluntary Euthanasia
Advocates of voluntary euthanasia contend that if a person is
(a) suffering from a terminal illness;
(b) unlikely to benefit from the discovery of a cure for that illness during what remains of her life expectancy;
(c) as a direct result of the illness, either suffering intolerable pain, or only has available a life that is unacceptably burdensome (because the illness has to be treated in ways which lead to her being unacceptably dependent on others or on technological means of life support);
(d) has an enduring, voluntary and competent wish to die (or has, prior to losing the competence to do so, expressed a wish to die in the event that conditions (a)-(c) are satisfied); and
(e) unable without assistance to commit suicide,
then there should be legal and medical provision to enable her to be allowed to die or assisted to die.
There is a ‘Church of Euthanasia’, which has four pillars of…belief, I guess you could call it.
On a more serious note, evidentially the Netherlands has some rather expansive laws concerning suicide that are controversial to say the least. Currently, Dutch law allows doctors to administer a lethal dose of dope to terminally ill patients, at their request. The Groningen Protocol, as it is known, lets doctors euthanize patients who lack "free will." This would include babies, people in irreversible comas and the severely retarded. In the Netherlands, Groningen University Hospital has decided its doctors will euthanize children under the age of 12, if doctors believe their suffering is intolerable or if they have an incurable illness. Nice, huh?
