Michael Schiavo’s World

An excerpt from Chuck Colson:

Joking aside, Michael Schiavo’s world is a dangerous and scary place, a place where the “survival of the fittest” is taken to a whole new level—a place where a badly brain-damaged woman should have her food and water taken away simply because she is badly brain damaged and her husband says she would not want to live that way. It’s a place where it’s easy for even a registered nurse like Michael Schiavo to confuse food, which everyone needs, with the kind of life support, like a respirator, which his wife did not need. It’s a place where, as Schiavo is accustomed to saying with a straight face, taking someone’s food away is not starving her to death; it’s simply allowing her to die peacefully and painlessly. (Why a hospice needs to administer morphine to a person dying painlessly is something that Schiavo does not bother to explain, like so many other issues.)

Comments

[EricTN]

WRONG-O. A scary world is increasingly one in which people we love should be condemned to live forever in a semi-conscious state simply because we as a modern human race can make it so. Our ability to do this will only increase each year with each scientific advance. Oh boy, we get to merge with the machine. But of course, we'll only be doing this to those folk who can't tell us how much they wish we wouldn't. We simply choose to punish and torture them for having the temerity to not flatline before we can entubate them.

[Dave Munger]

What a compelling point by point refutation! So she was "semi-conscious" now. Just conscious enough that it would be cruel to let her live, not conscious enough that it would be cruel to kill her in a way that would be cruel if it were done to a fully concious person. Why didn't anyone just say so at the time? So much needless rancor. At least they disposed of her before there was a chance of a TRULY unthinkable outcome. You people tipped your hand big time, now everyone knows that Democrats are not human.

[Maven]

Now Dave, to be fair, there were plenty of democrats who tried to save Terri.

Eric though seems to equate a feeding tube as "Merging with the machine". I suppose it wouldn't matter if she was otherwise *fully* conscious. If they can't tell us their wishes, Eric believes we should assume they prefer death.

[Maven]

Now Dave, to be fair, there were plenty of democrats who tried to save Terri.

Eric though seems to equate a feeding tube as "Merging with the machine". I suppose it wouldn't matter if she was otherwise *fully* conscious. If they can't tell us their wishes, Eric believes we should assume they prefer death.

[Andrea Harris]

"Semi-conscious"? Good God, "semi-conscious" can define people coming out of a coma to people half asleep on the sofa. Semi-conscious people aren't brain dead? What the hell is wrong with you?

[Andrea Harris]

That should be an exclamation point after "semi-conscious people aren't brain dead," not a question mark. My fingers must have been semi-conscious. (And thus to people like EricTN should therefore be chopped off immediately and left to dry up and shrivel on the table.)

[EricTN]

Stroll through some nursing homes tomorrow. In some rooms you'll see loving families gathered around, talking to a loved one whose time is near. In other rooms you won't see any visitors, just hear the wheezing and clanking of machines. Machines next to a bed on which a body with life lies. The body has life because the primitive brain (that's what it's called, look it up) is functioning sufficiently to keep the body's heart beating and the blood circulating at some level. There is a mind, or part of a mind locked in the head attached to the body that can no longer move on its own power. Try lying on your own comfy bed for a day without moving whatsoever - no shifting your position at all. You won't be able to accomplish it, it's so utterly uncomfortable and unnatural. Now try to imaging that your brain is sufficient damaged that you've lost the ability to interpret language. Somewhere in your past you told your best friend you NEVER EVER EVER want to live out your last years as someone's lab experiment. But unlike your luckier friends, you never wrote that wish down, before you got struck down. The person or persons that got you your room in the nursing home don't visit - they're busy living their lives. You're trapped with whatever thoughts your brain allows while your primitive brain and the wonders of modern science keep you in solitary for years. Why do you think one of the worst things we can do to criminals is put them in solitary, in sensory depravation and alone? And why are the most religeous of you afraid to let someone go on to their reward, why do you fearfully cling to this world, why do you selfishly refuse to LET GO. You stick the tubes in the patient that can't ever come back, FOR YOU -- NOT FOR THEM.

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