Removal of Feeding Tube (pray)

[Saw11_2000]

Originally Posted by Majikthise

My wife and I have discussed this issue at length.I do not want my parents to decide what happens to me and make my wifes life any worse than it would be .My parents have not been my legal gaurdians for 22 years even though they still treat me like a child sometimes.As a result we are going to have legal documents drawn up to protect each other in the unlikely event of this situation.I'm sure someone would try to attack my wife's character in any event.

That's a very smart things to do to ensure your wishes are carried out.

Off topic:NB=New Bedfaaaaahd? :P

[BUDDY]

March 17, 2005, 7:58 a.m.
Torturing Terri Schiavo
She’d be better off if she were a terrorist.

A few months back, I wrote an article for Commentary arguing that we ought to reconsider our anti-torture laws. The argument wasn’t novel. It echoed contentions that had been made with great persuasive force by Harvard’s Professor Alan Dershowitz: that under circumstances of imminent harm to thousands of moral innocents (the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario), it would be appropriate to inflict, under court-supervision, intense but non-lethal pain in an effort to wring information from a morally culpable person — a terrorist known to be complicit in the plot. As one might predict with such a third rail, my mail was copious and indignant. Opening the door by even a sliver for torture, I was admonished, was the most reprehensible of slippery slopes. No matter how well-intentioned was the idea, no matter the lives that might be saved, no matter how certain we might be about the guilt of the detainee, the very thought that such a thing might be legal would render us no better than the savages we were fighting.

Well, lo and behold, a court-ordered torture is set to begin in Florida on Friday at 1 P.M.

It will not produce a scintilla of socially useful information. It will not save a single innocent life. It is not narrowly targeted on a morally culpable person — the torture-victim is herself as innocent as she is defenseless. It is not, moreover, meant to be brief and non-lethal: The torture will take about two excruciating weeks, and its sole and only purpose is to kill the victim.

On Friday afternoon, unless humanity intervenes, the state of Florida is scheduled to begin its court-ordered torture-murder of Terri Schiavo, whose only crime is that she is an inconvenience. A nuisance to a faithless husband grown tired of the toll on his new love interest and depleting bank account — an account that was inflated only because a jury, in 1992, awarded him over a million dollars, mostly as a trust to pay for Terri’s continued care, in a medical malpractice verdict.

In this instance, though, deafening is the only word for the silence of my former interlocutors — -civil-liberties activists characteristically set on hysteria auto-pilot the moment an al Qaeda terrorist is rumored to have been sent to bed without supper by Don Rumsfeld or Al Gonzales (something that would, of course, be rank rumor since, if you kill or try to kill enough Americans, you can be certain our government will get you three halal squares a day).

Not so Terri Schiavo. She will be starved and dehydrated. Until she is dead. By court order.

Terri is a 40-year-old woman who suffered brain damage after a diagnosed heart attack when she was 26. In state legal proceedings dominated by macabre right-to-die activists, a judge found her to be reduced to a permanent vegetative state (PVS), drawing on examinations that appear grossly inadequate to the task of what objective specialists say is a complex diagnosis. Whether she would technically be found a PVS case by a court that was honestly interested in getting a real fix on her condition — rather than breaking new ground in just how far the Left can go in deciding whose life has value — is beside the point. She is alive and, periodically, both alert and responsive.

Her parents love her and want to care for her. Imagine if you had a child who was defenseless, dependent, and vulnerable — many of us, indeed, need not imagine — and the state told you not only to step aside but that you had to watch, helpless, while it took two weeks to kill her. That’s what’s happening in Florida. Starting Friday.

On another Friday, seven years ago, Mohammed Daoud al-`Owhali and Khalfan Khamis Mohammed blew up the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 240 people. They were brought to the United States for trial. They were given, at public expense, multiple, highly experienced capital lawyers, and permitted extensive audiences to plead with the Justice Department not to seek the death penalty. When a capital indictment nevertheless was filed, they were given weeks of voir dire to ensure a jury of twelve people open to the notion that even the lives of mass-murderers have value. They were then given seven months of trial and sentencing proceedings, suffuse with every legal and factual presumption that their lives had worth and should be spared. And so they were.

That’s what the law says we must do for terrorists seeking to destroy our country and to slaughter us indiscriminately.

What is the law doing for Terri Schiavo?

What kind of law is it, what kind of society is it, that says the lives of Khalfan Khamis Mohammed and Mohammed Daoud al-`Owhali’s have value — over which we must anguish and for the sustenance of which we must expend tens of thousands annually — but Terri Schiavo’s is readily dispensable? By court-ordered torture over the wrenching pleas of parents ready and willing to care for her?

What kind of society goes into a lather over the imposition of bright lights and stress positions for barbarians who might have information that will save lives, but yawns while a defenseless woman who hasn’t hurt anyone is willfully starved and dehydrated? By a court — the bulwark purportedly protecting our right to life?

The torture starts Friday, at 1 P.M. Unless we do something to stop it.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and eleven others, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

* * *

[Saw11_2000]

Very valid points EEWRED.

I'm curious as to your personal beliefs why she should be kept alive. Do you feel it is morally wrong to kill a crippled human being? Or do you regard her as normal? Do you feel sympathetic toward her situation?

Have you ever heard: "If you love someone, let them go"?
I think it might be best for her, in this situation.

[Majikthise]

Doesn't change my mind.

[Green Gaia]

Nice unbiased article there...

It didn't answer my question though... will Terri ever be allowed to die?

[Quoth The Raven]

So this weeks sinister motive is 'advancing the cause of the left'?

Oh, and Maize, I'll answer that question for you. She'll be allowed to die after her parents are dead, unless it suits someone's agenda to keep her alive a little longer.

[BUDDY]

The article just makes some interesting points I thought. I don't believe in conspiracy theories, so lady_lazarus, I don't think that there is a motive politically here at all. I know now that I won't convince any of you that this is the wrong thing to do. I just can't agree with starving a person to death. That is about it for me on this issue. I respect the opinion of each and everyone of you and hold your beliefs and opinions dear, whether I agree with them or not. I do believe that all of you think that this is the humane thing to do, I don't doubt that. I just can't agree and therefore become very passionate about my stance because we are talking about a person's life. I hope you all can understand.

[Jaymes]

How is it torture if she can't feel pain?

[Saw11_2000]

It doesn't classify as torture, but I just don't think its morally right.

I sure as hell wouldn't want to be starved if I had to die even if I couldn't feel it.

If for some reason I couldn't feel pain, I wouldn't want to be treated in-human. I wouldn't want to be an experiment, or have exploratory surgery performed on my regardless of whether or not I feel it. I think it is a certain level of respect and humane treatment we should adhere to. Just my 2 cents.