Pro-Life News Roundup

• Bishop Gerald A. Gettelfinger of Evansville said he will not attend an April right-to-life dinner where Republican Chairman Michael Steele is scheduled to speak because he objects to comments he made about abortion. (Catholic Chronicle March 30, 2009.
  

  
  

• Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, has signed a bill into law banning the use of some state funds for embryonic stem cell research:

  The move puts the DNC chairman at odds with President Obama, who signed an executive order earlier this month reversing the Bush administration's ban on federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells.
  

  Kaine approved the Virginia bill on Monday, according to the governor's office, the same day he enacted legislation that would permit "Choose Life" license plates in the commonwealth — an act that angered state and national abortion rights advocates.

  Good for him.
  

• Gov. Kathleen Sebelius signed the Woman's Right To Know Act, permitting women to see an ultrasound or hear a fetal heartbeat before receiving an abortion and requiring abortion clinics to offer information about fetal development. (The Wichita Eagle March 29, 2009.
  

• The fourth anniversary of Terri Schiavo's death by court-ordered dehydration was observed by Priests for Life and Terri's Foundation with a Memorial Mass, celebrated by Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life and Fr. Thomas Euteneuer, President of Human Life International.
  

• Four More Bishops Make Thirteen Opposed to Notre Dame Obama Invitation LifeSiteNews.com April 1, 2009.
  

Remember Terri Schiavo (December 3, 1963 - March 31, 2005)

Terri Schiavo passed away 3 years ago today. CPS' colleague Jay Anderson reports from Pro Ecclesia.

See also:

• The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation - "The mission of the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation is to develop a national network of resources and support for the medically-dependent, persons with disabilities, and the incapacitated who are in or potentially facing life-threatening situations. Promoting a Culture of Life, 'Terri’s Foundation' embraces the true meaning of compassion by opposing the practice of euthanasia."
  

• Barack Obama vs. Terri Schiavo, by Nat Hentoff. Jewish World Review March 27, 2008. Hentoff revisits the case in responding to a certain presidential candidate from Illinois who confesses that that one vote he'd like to take back in his career in public service was that which allowed Congress to intervene in the murder of Terri Schiavo.
  

Awakenings: The Schiavo case revisited, by Wesley J. Smith
The Weekly Standard 11/05/2007, Volume 013, Issue 08:

On October 19, only months after being nearly dehydrated to death when his feeding tube was removed, Jesse Ramirez walked out of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix on his own two legs. Ramirez is lucky to be alive. Early last June, a mere one week after a serious auto accident left him unconscious, his wife Rebecca and doctors decided he would never recover and pulled his feeding tube. He went without food and water for five long days. But then his mother, Theresa, represented by lawyers from the Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, successfully took Rebecca to court demanding a change of guardianship on the grounds that Rebecca and Jesse's allegedly rocky marriage disqualified her for the role.

The judge ordered that Jesse be temporarily rehydrated and nourished. Then Jesse regained consciousness. Now, instead of dying by dehydration, he will receive rehabilitation and get on with his life--all because his mother rejected the reigning cultural paradigm that a life with profound cognitive dysfunction is not worth living.

Ramirez is only the latest instance of an unconscious patient waking up after being consigned to death by dehydration. . . .

Catholic Sen Mel Martinez says he was mistaken on Schiavo debate

From the South Florida Sun-Sentinel:

Nearly a year after calling for federal involvement to keep a brain-damaged woman artificially alive against her husband's wishes, Republican U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez has said it was a mistake to become involved.
Martinez, who has just completed his first year in office, led the Senate charge pushing a bill that would have given federal courts jurisdiction to reinstate Terri Schiavo's feeding tubes.

"If I had to take one lesson away, it's perhaps decisions of this nature really belong in state courts, not federal courts,'' Martinez said in a taped interview for Political Connections that aired Sunday on Bay News 9.

"Perhaps this was not in the realm of federal concern. It may have been better left to state courts to deal with it,'' Martinez said.

...

The effort to keep Schiavo alive proved unsuccessful and was vigorously opposed by a large segment of the public.

...

Martinez had previously stood by his role in the Schiavo controversy, but his new position comes two weeks after Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist recounted the lessons he learned from the Schiavo controversy: "The American people don't want you involved in these decisions.''

When I read stories like this I agree with Mark Shea's description of the Republican Party as the "Stupid Party", but this is more troubling to me because Sen Martinez is Catholic.

The Catechism instructs us that it is permissible to discontinue medical procedures "that are burdensome, dangerous, extraordinary, or disproportionate to the expected outcome" (# 2278). At the same time, even if a patient is expected to die soon, "the ordinary care owed to a sick person cannot be legitimately interrupted" (#2279). Would "ordinary care" include food and water? Yes! Catholics must form our consciences on the basis of Church teaching (cf. CCC #408, #1811) not on the basis of an expediency which tells us that life is ours to terminate whenever we find it to be socially or financially convenient. Our lives-and our deaths-are ultimately God's decisions.

Congress and the President merely asked the federal court with jurisdiction to look at this case again. Why was that so wrong? And as a Catholic, given the circumstances of Terri's situation why would you not want this to be looked at again if there was a chance that the courts had missed something in the law? Because polls show that is what folks think? Hence the "stupid" label.

One would hope our Catholic pols would exhibit leadership and work to help their constituents understand why they voted as they did. And one would also hope that they act like the Catholics they purport to be on this issue rather than succumb to polling numbers. Am I overreacting? Maybe, but this just really bugs me.

UPDATE: The Schindler family responds to Sen Martinez:

Bobby Schindler, spokesperson for the Foundation states: “I am hopeful that Senator Martinez is not reacting to mixed news reports over the public’s view of Congress’s actions in protecting my sister’s life. Though some news outlets have reported that poll responses did not favor Congress’s involvement, there are others that greatly support protections of disabled and vulnerable people like Terri.”

According to an April, 2005 poll, 80% of likely voters said that a disabled person who is not terminally ill or in a coma, and not being kept alive by life support should not, in the absence of a written directive to the contrary, be denied food and water (Source: Zogby International).

An additional Zogby poll showed that 74% of those participating believed that it is proper for the federal government to intervene when basic civil rights are being denied.

“It has always been my family’s position that Terri was denied her basic rights,” states Schindler, “Our family and our foundation want to encourage those in Congress to uphold the basic principles of our Constitution and ensure that people with disabilities, our aging communities and the vulnerable are not stripped of their voices or denied fair and just treatment, based on hearsay. A more sensible standard of proof should be compulsory before a life is ended in this way.”

“Senator Martinez has an opportunity to stand up for the vulnerable,” said Schindler, “Our Foundation hopes he will not be swayed from acting as a public servant.”

Recent comments regarding the Schiavo matter from Martinez and Senate Majority leader, Bill Frist, have prompted the Foundation to again call for protections for incapacitated persons.

Tim Kaine again

The more I hear about him the more I hope Tim Kaine loses next week.

Terri Schiavo's Estranged Husband Endorses Virginia Governor Candidate

Richmond, VA (LifeNews.com) -- He lives in Florida, but Terri Schiavo's estranged husband, the man who won approval from the courts to euthanize her last spring, has endorsed a candidate for governor in Virginia. Michael Schiavo wants Virginia residents to back Democrat Tim Kaine over Republican Jerry Kilgore next week.

Schiavo said he based his endorsement not on a meeting with either candidate. Instead, he made it based upon hearing their responses to a question in an October debate about whether they would intervene in familial disputes about lifesaving medical treatment, such as the legal battle he fought against Terri's family.

"I have seen firsthand what can happen when a governor disagrees with a single citizen," Schiavo said in a statement distributed by a Democratic political consulting firm.

"In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush abused the power of his office in an attempt to replace my personal family decisions with his own opinions and political grandstanding," he added.

Governor Bush signed Terri's Law approved by the state legislature to authorize him to ask doctors to reinsert Terri's feeding tube and prevent the euthanasia death.

During the debate, Kilgore, who enjoys the backing of pro-life groups, said he would not "agree to the forced starvation of any individual if that individual hasn't had a say."

"I don't think governors should use their PR grandstanding to intervene in these cases," Kaine replied, according to an AP report. He said he supports the courts ending disputes like the one involving Terri.

Derek Newton, manager of the Miami-based November Group that released the statement told the Associated Press Michael wanted it released because he intends to get involved in politics.

"Michael issued the statement because he is interested in getting more involved in the political process," Newton said.

Neither campaign responded to requests for comment.

Michelle Malkin responds to those gloating over Terri's death

Michelle Malkin -- a journalist with a good head on her shoulders and a credit to her profession -- provides "a sober look" at the autopsy results, with hard words on "the callous gloaters on the other side of this debate . . . who can only talk about the sanctity of life if it's enclosed in ghost quotes and pronounced with a sneer."

It is not clear to me from the neuropathology report when and over what period the much-talked-about brain shrinkage occurred. I have also noticed that some are already mocking the claim that Terri recognized visitors (note that the report also does not appear to indicate when and over what period that loss of sight occurred).

For God's sake.

Terri Schiavo, a profoundly disabled woman who was not terminally ill and who had an army of family members ready to care for her for the rest of her natural life, succumbed to forced dehydration at the hands of her spouse-in-name-only.

This is something to gloat about?

She provides a good roundup of other blogger responses.

Terri Schiavo's Autopsy

The banner headlines and the articles tell us that the autopsy results for Terri Schiavo show that her brain damage was untreatable and that this result means it was right to deny her food and water (see, for example, today's N.Y. Times). The N.Y. Times reports that the official cause of death is "marked dehydration," not starvation. It is no surprise that no county physician would have used the word "starvation"--that would have been like expecting the current Supreme Court to call abortion "murder." Authorities know that words, however factually accurate, can be dangerous to the legitimacy of their power.

Even if one should accept the conclusion that Terri's brain damage was untreatable in any way or form, the immorality, the evil, of starving her remains. She was not dying. The courts killed her precisely because she was not dying. The feeding tube was not damaging her, but rather keeping her alive. She did not have a disease that was causing her crucial organs to stop functioning.

And so the question becomes: do you deny the ordinary care of a feeding tube to someone whose severe brain damage seems to be beyond treatment of any kind? The answer is no because in these circumstances denying the feeding tube is an act of mercilessness and cruelty. Ordinary care is that care which is the basic minimum required by mercy. In the medical circumstances of Terri Schiavo, mercy required nutrition and hydration. Those who ruled otherwise damaged themselves severely by making themselves merciless. If sin is self-mutilation, then the judges who favored removing the tube in this particular case mutilated themselves morally. And so a moral autopsy of our judicial system would read: "cause of moral death: lack of mercy." As others have said, in moral terms, the one most damaged by evil is the evildoer.

Pope Benedict meets the parents of Terri Schiavo

In this picture released by the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano, Pope Benedict XVI meets with Terri Schiavo's parents, Roy Schindler, right, and Mary Schindler presenting him with pictures of their daughter at the weekly general audience in St. Peter's square at the Vatican, Wednesday, May 18, 2005. - YahooNews.com.

The Final Hours of Terri Schiavo

Terri Schiavo's Final Hours: An Eyewitness Account, by Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director, Priests for Life and President of the National Pro-life Religious Council:

Brothers and sisters to describe the way she looked as peaceful is a total distortion of what I saw. Here now was a person, who for thirteen days had no food or water. She was, as you would expect, very drawn in her appearance as opposed to when I had seen her before. Her eyes were open but they were going from one side to the next, constantly oscillating back and forth, back and forth. The look on her face (I was staring at her for three and a half-hours) I can only describe as a combination of fear and sadness . . . a combination of dreaded fear and sadness.

Her mouth was open the whole time. It looked like it was frozen open. She was panting rapidly. It wasn't peaceful in any sense of the word. She was panting as if she had just run a hundred miles. But a shallow panting. Her brother Bobby was sitting opposite me. He was on one side of the bed I was on the other facing him. Terri's head in between us and her sister Suzanne was on my left. We sat there and we had a very intense time of prayer. And we were talking to Terri, urging her to entrust herself completely to the Savior. I assured her repeatedly of the love and prayers and concern of so many people.

We held her hand and stroked her head. During those hours, one of the things I did was to chant, in Latin, some of the most ancient hymns of the Church. One of the chants I used was the "Victimae Paschali Laudis," which is the ancient proclamation of the resurrection of Christ. There, as I saw before my eyes the deadly work of the Culture of Death, I proclaimed the victory of life. "Life and death were locked in a wondrous struggle," the hymn declares. "Life's Captain died, but now lives and reigns forevermore!"

And then we had just times of silence . . . just sitting there in silence trying to absorb what was happening.

READ THE WHOLE THING, and remember it the next time you hear another dismiss her with the claim "she died peacefully." She was murdered, plain and simple. God have mercy.

"We're going to use Terri Schiavo later on."

Who said that?

DNC Chair Howard Dean this past Friday.

Suprised?

I'm not.

Disgusting! How can Democrats remain silent about this man and his remarks here?

Yes, the GOP memo from a now fired staffer of Senator Martinez of Florida which looked at the Congressional legislation as "good" for Republicans was dispicable. But that memo did not come from the chairman of major political party.

"Thanks Be to God, Our Sister Is Being Cared For"

From the pages of Life Matters! . . .

Jorge Mederos' article cited below has been published by La Raza.

"By the intervention of the State of Illinois government, feeding was resumed for Clara Martinez," the paper's editor reports. "She had been 30 days without food per her husband's decision."

Some forty people were brought together by the Hispanic Evangelical Church for a vigil of prayers and hymns. They were greeted with the news that she was once again receiving nutrition. "Thanks be to God, our sister is being cared for,” said Bolivian Pastor Guillermo Espinoza.

Sources at the state's Department of Human Services told the EFE wire service that the woman's gastric feeding tube was ordered reconnected after the visit by an inspector to the house where she is being attended. Authorities would otherwise have ordered her moved to a hospital.

According to Espinoza, the state's intervention resulted from pressure by the press and right-to-life organizations in the United States....

The case, made public by La Raza newspaper, had immediate repercussions in the community of almost a million Mexicans who live in Illinois.

Furthermore, several right-to-life organizations, especially the movement that emerged with the Terri Schiavo case, pressured authorities with threats of recourse to a restraining order for legal protection for the Mexican woman.

These organizations also offered legal assistance to the family of Clara Martínez to fight in court against her husband's decision.

Editor's Note:

CURE's offer of assistance to Clara Martinez and her family, of course, still stands. Winning a battle should not be confused with ending the war. That can prove a deadly error.

Pastor Exposes Spousal Starvation

From the pages of Life Matters! . . .

As posted by CURE advisor Tim Ruchti on Blogs for Terri:

Several people have emailed me the following story about Clara Martinez, a Chicago woman who is reportedly being starved to death.

Martinez suffered a debilitating stroke a year ago, and her husband signed a "Do-Not-Resuscitate" order that led to the disconnection of her feeding tube. She is able to consume liquids through her mouth and, so far, has survived for thirty days without food.

Under "normal" circumstances her situation would have gone unnoticed had it not been for the intervention of a pastor of the Hispanic Evangelical Church. Her family also opposes the husband's decision.

I spoke to the article's author, Jorge Mederos. He said the family feels "powerless" and has called the media without response. "No one is paying attention," he said. "The family is planning a protest tomorrow or over the weekend."

Here is the first portion of the article.

In a house on Chicago's southeast side, a Mexican family is going through a heartbreak like the tragedy that befell the American Terri Schiavo’s family and deeply affected both those who defend the right to life and partisans of euthanasia. But no voices had been raised so far in this case because very few knew about the situation concerning the 39-year-old Latin woman whose husband decided to disconnect the tube that had been feeding her during her three and a half years in a vegetative state.

As of the close of this edition, Clara Martinez, 39 years old and mother of two children—aged five and seven years—had been almost 30 days without food and was still alive, taking only water. For the last year she has been cared for in her home, with special medical equipment installed in the living room, while the rest of the family try to go on with their lives.

This woman has remained in this condition since suffering a stroke. She was cared for in the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Medical Center, later at an intermediate care facility, then at the hospital again, and finally she was taken to her home. At that time the physicians had judged her condition to be irreversible.

Under these conditions her husband Salvador Martinez, 35 years old and also Mexican, resolved that his wife should not live artificially. He signed a "Do Not Resuscitate" order to keep her from being revived artificially and disconnected the feeding machine. Under these conditions the woman should have died by withdrawal of feeding and the case would have gone unnoticed, had it not been for the intervention of a pastor of the Hispanic Evangelical Church at 4340 W. 87th St....

[The pastor] said that when he was with the wife, "she moved, opened her eyes, and when we prayed and sang together by her bedside, she blinked as though she was listening." He said it was also significant that, in spite of her condition, the woman was still "able to take water."

Read the rest of Jorge Mederos' article in La Raza.

Editor's Note:

Tim has been in touch with Pastor Guillermo Espinoza, and CURE is offering its assistance to the family. May God bless Pastor Espinoza for raising his voice in defense of Clara's Martinez's God-given right to life. Our compliments to Mr. Mederos and La Raza for exposing this covert crime in the making, which is no longer hidden thanks to their professional reporting.

True Believers or False Deceivers?

Once again demonstrating that the Catholic vote is not a myth, its erstwhile traditional beneficiary, the Democrat Party, is renewing its efforts to entice it. "When it comes to religion, and particularly the 'Catholic vote,' Democrats have become true believers," Joe Feurherd observes in the National Catholic Reporter. NCR's Washington correspondent cites a 17-page memo on "Reclaiming the White Catholic Vote" by political operative Stanley Greenberg, a sidekick of the infamous Ragin' Cajun, James Carville.

"The Democrats can compete comfortably for half the Catholics," Greenberg claims at the onset.

Democrats win their greatest support from the less observant [and] those looking for a more modern Church...[Indeed,] Democrats hold a 22-point advantage in partisanship among those who would prefer a more modern Church.

It is interesting to note how the modernists peddle the embrace of evils as ancient as child sacrifice and unnatural vice as "modernity."

"But half is not good enough" to win elections, Greenberg concedes. "which means reaching across the cultural divide." True enough, but the question remains, as when Dives begged Lazarus for a drop of water to wet his burning lips across another monumental gap, can they? As Feurherd puts it:

The question, therefore, is no longer whether Democrats should appeal to the socially-conservative but economically-liberal voters who were once a core part of their constituency, but how they can do so without alienating the party's culturally-liberal base.

This will not be an easy task. Consider a few of the examples of Democrat efforts to woo "traditional Catholics" cited by Feuherd:

• "Since November's election, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton and newly-installed Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean have lamented the party's inability to reach out to Democrats who oppose abortion-rights but agree with the party's principals [sic] on most every other issue."

But when, shortly after his 2004 defeat by President George W. Bush, Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) told a closed-door liberal confab that Democrats needed to welcome more pro-life candidates into the party, there was an audible gasp, Nancy Keenan, NARAL Pro-Choice America, reported. And Planned Parenthood's Gloria Feldt whined that Kerry "had not helped his cause," echoing the complaints of many pro-aborts who blamed Kerry for not talking enough about his abortion albatross in a race lost in large measure in the Catholic vote.

• Rev. Jim Wallis' God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It, is a best seller.

But when the leftist minister wrote in defense of Terri Schiavo that "I cannot understand why parents willing to take care of their disabled daughter were not allowed to" and quoted his wife's observation that "the issue is not [the] quality of life, but the ethical quality of our society," the overwhelming response from readers of Sojourners' SoJoMail was negative.
Typical comments included a woman who described the mentally disabled woman as "already dead" and another who opined that "keeping a brainstem and heart functioning can in no way be defined as 'life.'"

• Congressional Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, promoted the candidacy of former Rep. Tim Roemer, a pro-life Catholic, to head the Democratic National Committee.
  

But, of course, Roemer's doomed candidacy failed when he was defeated by pro-abort Dean, in a campaign in which, as James Antell reported for American Daily:

Roemer's candidacy was bogged down in the controversy over his pro-life congressional voting record. At some forums for the would-be DNC chairmen, pro-choice audience members would boo him when he rose to speak. He frequently found himself under attack.

"One day I received by messenger a dirty and smudged envelope with no return address," wrote the New Republic's Ryan Lizza. "Inside were five pages of anti-Roemer opposition research about his positions on everything from Israel and abortion to labor and Social Security."

"These tactics show the limits of Democratic outreach to pro-life voters and party members," Antell observed. As I concluded last December for Catholics in the Public Square:

Given the rabid resistance to the slightest concession to reason and, yes, morality by the Feminazis, any widening of the Democrat Party's tent in terms of pro-life Democrats and their views is apt to be a carnival sideshow: big on promise and short on delivery.

Orson Scott Card on Terri Schiavo

I missed this in the wake of the passing of our Holy Father, but at the website Ornery American, the science-fiction/fantasy writer Orson Scott Card weighs in on Million Dollar Baby and the tragedy of Terri Schiavo: "Whose Life Is Worth Living?" March 20, 2005.

I could post an excerpt, but the whole essay is good.

Also, via Peter Sean Bradley (Lex Communis), another article by Card on Pope John Paul II: -- offering some interesting remarks on his passing from his perspective as a devout Mormon: "Why I Miss Karol Wojtyla" (RealClearPolitics, April 9, 2005).

Orson Scott Card first gained recognition as a talented science fiction writer, earning numerous rewards for novels like Ender's Game. In the past several years he has also proven himself to be an exceptional social critic, suprising many fans (and earning the condemnation of others) by his "conservative" views on abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, etc. We should be thankful that this Mormon is on our side in the culture war.

"Terri Saved My Brother's Life"

From the pages of Life Matters! . . .

As we honor Terri's legacy by fighting for Mae Magouirk,
it is encouraging to note one life already spared. –Editor
by Callie S. Baillie

My brother went into acute respiratory failure a year ago September at 45 years old. By the time I got the phone call, he was on a ventilator in the ICU of a small hospital several hours from my home. Think SARS without the contagious aspect, and you'll get some idea of his condition. As the Merck site puts it:

The survival rate for patients with severe ARDS who receive appropriate treatment is about 60%; if the severe hypoxemia of ARDS is not recognized and treated, cardiopulmonary arrest occurs in 90% of patients.

There was the usual story: long drives, long nights, phone ringing at any old hour—"You'd better come, and do you want us to resuscitate if his heart stops before you get here?"—that sort of thing, but he kept reviving despite every expectation to the contrary.

One or the other of us showed up there every day, right on through Christmas. He got off oxygen and had his trach tube removed. He started eating again and went to physical therapy. And then, one January day, lo and behold, he went home. Wobbly, frail, confused, forgetful, but home.

Two months later, he was buying books and shopping at Wal-Mart. He'll be on a lot of medicine for the rest of his life, but that's a minor detail. And the reference to the news?

If I hadn't been seething for weeks over the attempted murder of Terry Schiavo, my brother would now be ashes.

Editor's Note

The newest member of CURE's Board of Advisors, Callie Baillie writes from Winslow, NC, where she hosts Christianity and Middle Earth.

Bloggers March as Mae Flees Hospice Death Camp

From the pages of Life Matters! . . .

As recently reported by my Blogs for Terri fellow author Richard here and elsewhere:

Just received telephone call (3:00 pm ET) from Ken Mullinax, nephew of Mae [Magouirk], followed by this e-mail:

Thanks to the support of all friends of Terri, my aunt Mae Magouirk has been air-lifted to the University of Alabama-Birmingham Medical Center...and [is] receiving IV fluids, nourishment and some of the finest medical care available in the United States! Praise be the name of the Lord God...

Thanks to Terri's friends... It would never ever have been possible without bloggers who love life and the truth!! I am racing from my home to UAB now and will type a detailed update after I see my Aunt Mae! Thanks, guys, your calls, emails, blogs and prayers did it all!!!

I so love you, guys!!!!!!!!!!

Ken Mullinax, nephew of Mae

It is not over yet—the opposition is still trying to get her back to the hospice—so keep fighting, bloggers and readers!

Editor's Note:

Ken, it looks like Cousin Beth may be suffering from "Michael Schiavo syndrome," whose chief symptom is a persistent urge to cause a family member to die prematurely.

Meanwhile, while it is we who salute you, not everyone shares your kind and generous assessment of our efforts, as witness the following rant that CURE is honored to have played its part in engendering:

Today a bunch of rightie bloggers are worked up over the case of a Georgia woman who they say is neither terminal nor comatose but is being deprived of care by a grandaughter who, naturally will inherit a bunch of money when Granny dies. In other words, they've found their new Terri Schiavo. [Editor's Note: They're not hard to find, just visit almost any hospice and most hospitals and nursing homes.]

Now, if the facts of the case are as the bloggers describe them, poor Granny is indeed being callously and cruelly starved to death. However, if the facts of the case are as the bloggers describe them, I will eat my sneakers.

Adidas, no doubt. Pass the salt! And remember, as Richard reminds us, keep fighting!

Revealing the Hidden Agenda: Checkbook Euthanasia

From the pages of Life Matters! . . .

Q: How can you tell when a euthanasia advocate is telling the truth?

A: When he disgusts you even more than usually.

Consider biological psychologist Hal Herzog, writing in the Asheville, NC, Citizens-Times on the moral, social, and legal issues raised not by Terri Schindler Schiavo's imposed death, but by her inadequate care.

Noting that "most commentators...have ignored the troubling inescapable financial consequences of severe irreversible brain damage to affected families and to taxpayers," Herzog proceeds to make the same case for checkbook euthanasia that Professors Karl Binding and Erich Hoche raised in Germany's Weimar Republic some 80 years ago in their seminal work The Destruction of Life Devoid of Value.

"Here are the facts," Herzog ominously begins:

According to a 2002 report in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, the frequency of persistent vegetative state in the United States is 64 to 140 per million people. Thus, somewhere between 538 and 1,176 North Carolinians are probably afflicted with this condition. At a cost of about $80,000 a year per person, this translates to an annual financial burden to the North Carolina health-care system of $43 million to $94 million—enough to hire between 1,500 and 3,500 additional public school teachers.

That last propaganda ploy, i.e., comparing the costs of caring for persons with disablities with the cost of funding productive laborers is right out of the euthanasia playbook. As Mark Mostert observes in the Fall 2002 issue of the Journal of Special Education:

In Binding and Hoche's terms, [the former] were "useless eaters" whose "ballast lives" could be tossed overboard to better balance the economic ship of state. In speaking of those with disabilities, and explicitly advocating involuntary euthanasia, Binding and Hoche wrote:

Their life is absolutely pointless, but they do not regard it as being unbearable. They are a terrible, heavy burden upon their relatives and society as a whole. Their death would not create even the smallest gap--except perhaps in the feelings of their mothers or loyal nurses.

Just like today!

Furthermore, Binding and Hoche drove home the economic argument by calculating the total cost expended in caring for such people. They concluded that this cost was "a massive capital in the form of foodstuffs, clothing and heating, which is being subtracted from the national product for entirely unproductive purposes."

As their disciple Herzog continues:

The life expectancy of a young adult in a persistent vegetative state is 11.5 years, making their lifetime health-care costs about $1 million. With a median family income of $38,000, few North Carolina families can bear this burden. Who should pay to keep people like Terri Schiavo alive?

Could this be why Judge George Greer ruled so consistently for Terri's eradication? After all, the Republican judge's conservatism was scarcely the compassionate sort.

The Living Will and the Will to Live

In the wake of the murder of Terri Schiavo at the hands of the court, blogger Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam has an important post on distinguishing between a "Living Will" -- and its unforseen and unintended consequences -- and a properly defined "Loving Will" as an ethical alternative, with additional resources from the National Right to Life Committee and American Life League.

The bottom line is this: if you are someone who doesn't want medical technology to prolong your last hours, but who also doesn't want to be starved or allowed to die just because you have a disability, your wishes will be far more likely to be respected if you sign a properly prepared Will to Live than if you sign a living will.

Something to consider before joining the crowd in their frenzied rush to the lawyer.

GOP on Judicial Offensive

FoxNews reports that the GOP is on a judicial offensive to reign in the tyrannical and irrational actions we have seen in the 14-day starvation of Terri Schiavo before her helpless parents. So write letters to the editor, write to your representatives and senators, seek out pertinent bumper stickers, and let Terri's legacy be that we put the judicial tyrants in their place with new legislation. The actions of the courts in this matter have brought grievous shame to our country. The court system, the legal profession, the medical profession, and even law enforcement have all been put to shame for all to see. We cannot overlook this shame.

In a vast improvement over a previous program, Fox's Bill O'Reilly last night discussed the Schiavo case, finally, with a genuinely Catholic moral theologian and with Fox's surprisingly astute legal analyst who both agreed that the Schiavo murder took place because of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision which has desensitized our institutions to life and given us a demonic Culture of Death.

At a time when the Pope is gravely ill, we see clearly that he was indeed a great prophet sent by God to point out the great struggle we are in and are entering: building a Culture of Life in the face of so many excuses and rationalizations, even from some clerics, for shameless and astounding acts of evil. Our struggle is now joined, inspired by both Terri Schiavo and John Paul II, both with feeding tubes, whose sufferings have taken center stage through Holy Week and Easter. We now approach Divine Mercy Sunday, a commemoration we owe to John Paul II himself, in which we proclaim and affirm the message of mercy--a message so irrationally and uniformly rejected by so many courts to their eternal and everlasting shame.

The Real Terri Should Be Loved

The issues and debates swirl. They seem to focus on one question: is Terri Schiavo aware of anything? Is she conscious?

What we do know with certainty is that she is alive. She is dying not because of cancer or some other illness but rather because food and water have been cut off. She has been a "problem" precisely because she would not die. She has now stubbornly survived her cruel, unnecessary starvation for more days than the Culture of Death crowd, including such media giants as the N.Y. Times, would have liked. Her organs were functioning fine before her execution began.

We also know that she made sounds and certainly appeared to respond to the love of her parents. Yesterday, I saw two videos on the cable news. One video showed Terri responding to the loving demeanor of her mother. The other video showed a much less responsive Terri being subjected to the confusing and harsh sounding instructions of her legal spouse accompanied by a physician.

It reminded me of a story I read years ago about a woman who dedicated herself to helping disabled children. As I recall it, she recounted how once she came across an apparently nonresponsive, autistic child at a hospital with her family. This woman took the time to caress the child's head in a loving manner. The child responded with delight. You get what you sow. Affection elicits affection. We cannot know for certain, as a physician finally reminded us last night on one of the cable channels, how aware Terri is. But we do know that she certainly did engage in responsive behavior. It is no surprise that she responded to affection.

We do not know with certainty how aware she is. No doctor or neurologist, in spite of a falsely authoritative, unscientific, and nonempirical manner of speaking, knows for certain one way or another. There is real, genuine doubt. So what do we do?

Love--or to use the more precise Greek word agape--bears all things and endures all things, as St. Paul told us. Love is patient and kind. Agape is the appropriate response to a person. Agape is mercy. Agape resolves all doubts in favor of the person being loved. Agape does not cut off food and water.

But isn't agape merely an emotional and non-rational response? Not at all. Reason includes our emotions. There is even a popular book entitled Emotional Intelligence. Our reason is a recognition of reality that uses all of our resources as persons: emotion, intuition, and logic. Everything we have learned from thousands of years of civilization says that agape is the appropriate rational response to the weak, the vulnerable, the disabled.

In contrast, there is no reason at all to cut off the life of Terri Schiavo. If her executioners are right, then she has no awareness or no pain. So why kill her? They wish to kill her because she makes them uncomfortable. They view her existence as ugly and inconvenient. They refuse to see her as she is now and accept her as she is now.

The spouse claims to base everything on the wishes of a Terri in her early twenties. But the Terri we have now is 41. She is very different. But she is the only Terri we really have. The spouse is killing the real Terri for a Terri that is only a memory. Now, that is irrational: to kill what is real because of what is no longer real. If reason is being in tune with reality, then the spouse and his allies are being irrational.

This killing is not being done for Terri. It is being carried out because the living have rejected her as she really is now. Where is the rationality in that? Where is the agape? Where is the mercy? Where is the compassion? They are missing in action.