From a Scotsman.com, Scotland on Sunday article, Time for a moral revolution:
[ ... ] Last week, before the eyes of the whole world, the nation that has pledged to export its values to the rest of the globe set about starving and dehydrating one of its citizens to death. That it did so against the wishes of the president, Congress and the people only added to the horror of the situation. [my emphasis] If Terri Schiavo is still alive by the time you read this and there has been no new intervention, it will be her ninth day deprived even of water.The Schiavo case has been hugely misrepresented in the media, not least by the BBC, which has reported it under a 'Right to Die' caption. It is not about the right to die: it is about the right to kill. The weasel term 'persistent vegetative state' has been attached to Mrs Schiavo, although her husband has refused to have her tested to establish her clinical status. Terri Schiavo is not a vegetable; she is not on a life-support machine; she does not have any tubes attached to her body. She has received visitors, out of bed and fully dressed. Her feeding tube was not "removed", since it had never been a permanent attachment: doctors, constrained by court order, stopped connecting it to her at mealtimes.
The Schiavo family has put some startling videos on the internet which show Mrs Schiavo making eye contact with her mother, smiling and visibly reacting to her. There is strong evidence she is not in a so-called persistent vegetative state. Dr William Hammesfahr, a Nobel Prize-nominated neurologist who has an international reputation for treating brain-injured patients, said earlier this month: "We, and others I know, have treated many patients worse than Terri and have seen them regain independence and dignity."
Hammesfahr was not speaking speculatively, as his further remarks show: "There are many approaches that would help Terri Schiavo. I know, because I had the opportunity to personally examine her, her medical records, and her X-rays."
Yet Mrs Schiavo's medical records show she did not receive any rehabilitative therapy after 1993. Michael Schiavo, her husband, not only failed to procure such therapy but in 1993 tried to have antibiotics withheld from his wife when she was suffering from an infection; he was overruled by staff at the nursing home.
Schiavo, who has entered into a relationship with another woman by whom he has fathered two children, is the instigator of the move to end his wife's life, despite the opposition of her parents and siblings. Where are the feminists in this fight for a woman's life? What credibility does the "justice" system of the US retain when Judge George Greer presumes to make a clinical judgment that overrules Hammesfahr and hands down a death sentence on an innocent woman?
What must it be like to watch, helplessly, while food and water are denied you and you start to die by inches? If they did it to a laboratory rat, outraged activists would storm the building. Morality aside, this is being done on the authority of juju medical science. Some years ago, the British Medical Journal reported a study by clinicians of 40 patients referred to as being in a vegetative state; 43% were judged to have been misdiagnosed, although seven had been in this supposed state for more than a year and three of them for over four years. [ ... ]
"I thirst" was among the last words on the Cross. A human being dying of dehydration in Holy Week has an apocalyptic resonance. This Easter we must pledge ourselves to moral regeneration, reasserting our human dignity and the inviolability of all innocent life. [my emphasis]
Have we no shame?
(Article published Easter Sunday, 27 Mar 2005 in Scotland on Sunday, title: "Time for a moral revolution", by Gerald Warner, first two paragraphs: "Abortion 'on demand' and the scandalous Schiavo case have resonance in the week we celebrate the triumph of life over death [/]EASTER is a celebration of the triumph of life over death and of right over wrong. So it is peculiarly poignant that issues of life and death should be dominating the news this Easter, most dramatically so in the United States.")
Would that God the gift would gie us,
To see ourselves as others see us.
- Robert Burns
