« Back to the Magic Kingdom | Main | Overplaying our Hand »
March 27, 2005
All But Over for Terri
For Terri Schiavo it appears to be but all over.
This should be a difficult case. If Terri had left a "living will" or something indicating her wishes, if her husband wasn't such an miserable human being, and if some on the left weren't saying such mean things, then it would be a tough one. It would be tough to see someone starve to death, alledged "persistive vegitative state" or no. It would be tough to see this happen to someone who was, by heavens, still conscious, and apparently, at least to some degree, aware of her surroundings.
But we don't know her real wishes, her husband is a miserable human, and there are so many contradictions, that I see a miscarriage of justice occuring.
If the husband was a decent upright person, and the family all agreed that the feeding tube should be removed, then we could have a debate on the issue of what to do in these cases. We could disagree but the debate would (hopefully) remain civil. More to the point, we could debate the real issues in these cases without becoming involved with personalities.
A person on death-row would be given more judicial review than Terri is receiving. Where oh where are our great civil libertarians when you really need them?
As I've said before, on the one hand I am disheartened by the multitues who seem to want to see her dead. The utter lack of compassion that some prominent Democrats showed is maddening.
On the other hand, I am heartened by the fact that so many recognize the danger of a drift towards Netherlands-style euthanasia. This case may well be the one that energizes enough people so that we examine this issue thoroughly.
The Slippery Slope
Many on the other side of this issue will dismiss this fear, but I believe it a real one. All to often in the past thirty or so years we've seen the slippery-slope effect, after having been assured by the left that no such thing will happen. A few quick examples:
Abortion - Adocates of legal abortion assured us thirty years ago that it was only for rape and incest, or for the health of the mother. Today, of course, somewhere over 90% of all abortions are because the parent(s) simply did not want a child.
Gay marriage - Twenty or thirty years ago we were told that we should "tolerate" gay people. Ok, society said. Next thing we know we're told that you're a bigot if you don't approve of gay marriage and that the Boy Scouts are one of the worst organizations on earth. And, as a recent incident at Harvard involving Jada Pinkett Smith demonstrated, if gays are allowed to marry, using the "husband" or "wife" word will become as taboo as saying "Christmas break".
Living Wills
We're told that we'd better get a "living will" so that your loved ones will know what you would want done in a similar situation. Yet as Michelle Malkin has discovered, they're not all they're cracked up to be. She links to noted scholar James Q Wilson, who last week wrote that
Some people believe that all of these issues can be resolved if everyone signs a living will that specifies what is to be done to them under various conditions. The living will is supposed to determine unambiguously when a "Do Not Resuscitate" sign should be placed on a patient's hospital chart. Terri Schiavo had not signed a living will. If she had, we would not be facing these issues. But scholars have shown that we have greatly exaggerated the benefits of living wills. Studies by University of Michigan Professor Carl Schneider and others have shown that living wills rarely make any difference. People with them are likely to get exactly the same treatment as people without them, possibly because doctors and family members ignore the wills. And ignoring them is often the right thing to do because it is virtually impossible to write a living will that anticipates and makes decisions about all of the many, complicated, and hard to foresee illnesses you may face.He then cites a number of examples that will cause a "living will" to be thrown out of court. A durable power of attorney is more reliable, he says, but here you're not writing out your own wishes, but trusting someone else to make good ones for you.
Judicial Tyranny
I'm just about tired of hearing that "the government shouldn't get involved. As the invaluable Tom Sowell said in a column this week; "Do they think that the judges who authorized this are not the governmen?"
And so it goes. For these people it is perfectly acceptable to have life-and-death decisions made by the courts, but heaven-forbid if representatives elected by the people get involved. Then it's denounced as "politics" and "government interference". I know, this is nothing new. The left likes rule by elites. Me, I take the William F Buckley Jr approach: I'd rather be governed by the first two-hundred people in the phone book.
The Europeans
Of course they don't get it:
The attempts by the Congress and the president to limit the damage done by a judiciary that is unresponsive, elitist, arrogant, dictatorial, self-protecting — something very much like the government of France, come to think of it — looks, to Eric Fottorino, writing in Le Monde, like proof that Bush will do anything, including rushing to the "bedside of an almost-dead person" in a "coma," to cement his relationship with the Bible-thumping, gel-haired, tele-mullahs of the right. To the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the congressional intervention was a drama of "Life, Death and Power" with a grandstanding U.S. president bestirring himself from his Crawford ranch, something the paper claims he'd never do for a crisis or a mere war. In the leftwing Independent, the slow starvation of Terri Schiavo is how the paper's correspondent describes a death with "dignity," something Americans can't get right — no doubt because of what Tony Blair described to the Daily Telegraph as the "unhealthy" American penchant for giving religion a prominent role in election campaigns. For Libération, the whole save-Schiavo spectacle was enough to merit a sneering headline on a piece or two, but nothing more.
Ok, that's it on Terri. For now.
Posted by Tom at March 27, 2005 9:00 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.theredhunter.com/mt/refer.cgi/307
