Flip Side
The 1950s marked a vast increase in the popularity of recorded music. Teenagers and many adults flocked to their local record stores to purchase the latest hit songs. Each hit song was accompanied by a lesser known recording by the same artist on the back or flip side. Few people played the flip side but sometimes it contained a future hit that eventually came to the public's attention.
Twin Killers
Like the hit records of the 50s, the primary focus of the culture war has been on abortion. Few people have paid much attention to its deadly flip side, euthanasia. The judicial execution of Terri Schiavo in Florida has opened up the public eye to a foreboding future. Euthanasia is the logical derivative of a society that solves problems through the destruction of unborn children. Abortion and euthanasia are irrefutably linked in the putrid womb of the culture of death, like killer twins, intent on attacking God's most important creation, namely humans made in His image and likeness.
A Clash of Ideas
In March of 2005 John Leland wrote an article in the New York Times that linked Terri Schiavo to French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650). Leland believes the case has re-enacted a clash of ideas that has run through the history of Western thought. Descartes, like many Greek and Catholic philosophers before him, addressed the vital question of the value of each human life. He defined human life, not as biological life, which is an inviolable gift from God, but as consciousness, about which people can make judgments. Religions and secular humanists have battled over the meaning of Descartes' views ever since.
The late 19th and early 20th centuries spawned powerful intellectual forces that undermined the traditional respect for life. Progressive philosophies, such as socialism, modernism, Social Darwinism, and liberalism, all condemned in Pope Pius X's encyclical Doctrine of the Modernists in 1907, darkened the horizons for the sanctity of human life. Modernists held that God was no more than a backseat passenger on the journey of life.
Euthanasia derives from their progressive thinking that places the quality of life above the sanctity of life. The most egregious application of what is essentially a eugenics-based policy of euthanasia occurred in Germany after World War I. Euthanasia received its first great boost with the publication of the tract Permission of the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche in 1920. The authors enjoined Germans to replace their Christian traditions with those of the pagan Spartans and the Eskimo Inuit who killed their elderly parents and defective children.
By 1939 the Nazi government had established a full-fledged euthanasia program in relative secrecy. Under the direction of Philip Bouhler and Dr. Karl Brandt, the Nazis implemented the T-4 Euthanasie Programme or what can be called disability cleansing. Over 200,000 mentally ill adults and defective children were put to death under the rubric lebensunwertes Leben or life unworthy of life.
Family Feud
While the Terri Schiavo case did not enjoy the T-4 Program's secrecy, the mainstream American press turned it into a media circus that distorted the facts to the extent that a pall of confusion and misunderstanding reigned without interference.
On February 25, 1990, the 26-year-old Schiavo collapsed in her St. Petersburg apartment. A victim of a mysterious seizure, her heart stopped beating long enough for her to suffer severe brain damage. She had left no written instructions or living will, fostering a conflict of emotions and interests that dramatized the deadly scenario. In 1991 Michael Schiavo sued the doctors who had been treating her and the courts awarded him $700,000 for his wife's care and another $300,000 for loss of spousal companionship. He was named her sole guardian, responsible for all her medical care and rehabilitation.
When Terri's family, the Schindlers, sensed what was happening, they heroically determined to keep Terri alive. It was an uphill battle, since the courts recognized Michael as her sole guardian. In May of 1998, Michael filed a petition with the Florida Circuit Court to have her feeding tube removed, arguing that he had done everything possible to rehabilitate her.
Actually Michael had two serious conflicts of interest. At Terri's death he was scheduled to receive an additional $700,000 and he had become involved with another woman. In April of 2001 after a trial and more legal maneuvers, Terri's feeding tube was removed. Two days later a federal judge decided that more time was needed to sort out the issues. The tube was re-inserted.
Terri's Passion
One of the witnesses Michael Schiavo's attorney, pro-euthanasia advocate George Felos recruited in 2002, was Dr. Ronald Cranford, a bioethicist and strong advocate for euthanasia. Cranford calls himself Dr. Humane Death, and his specialty is the physician's role in killing and the intentional withdrawal of treatment.
In November 2002 Judge George Greer ruled that Terri's feeding tube should be removed because there was no compelling evidence that she would recover and that according to her husband's testimony, she would not want to continue receiving nourishment and hydration through a surgically implanted tube. Florida Governor Jeb Bush and the state legislature enacted emergency legislation, Terri's Law, which kept her feeding tube in place. In 2005 a Florida court struck down the law as unconstitutional.
On March 16th and 17th the U. S. Congress acted to block the removal of her feeding tube. They subpoenaed both Terri and Michael Schiavo to appear before Congressional committees. Judge Greer blocked the subpoenas and ordered the feeding tube removed. Terri could have been spoon-fed but Judge Greer refused to allow it. On March 20th and 21st Congress passed emergency legislation calling for a federal court to review the case. President George W. Bush immediately signed it into law.
On March 22nd Federal Circuit Judge Whittemore refused to order doctors to resume feeding on the grounds the family is unlikely to prevail in a new court case. The Schindlers continued their fight until they had exhausted all their life-saving options. Their daughter finally died of dehydration and starvation after thirteen long and horrible days on March 31st in a Pinellas Park, Florida hospice. After a legally mandated autopsy, her husband had her cremated.
Terri Schiavo was never in a PVS or Persistent Vegetative State. She was not terminally ill. She was not in a coma, nor was she on a respirator. She was not being kept alive by artificial means, anymore than small children are kept alive when a parent feeds them. She was no burden to her parents who were willing to care for her the rest of her natural life. Terri died through the aggressive determination of her husband and the court that removed her feeding tube.
Terri Schiavo underwent a painful and long capital punishment for the crime of being brain damaged. Michael Schiavo and the courts found her life to be unworthy of life. The public was told that her choice to die was being honored, although there is no evidence but hearsay to support the execution of her sentence. The media falsely reported that they were letting her die. The cause of her death was unnatural starvation.
Something of Value
The Schiavo case became grist for the media mill that surrounded her death. In the minds of many, her brain damage had eliminated her from the human race. During a television debate, bioethicist Bill Allen said human awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Fetuses, infants, and Alzheimer's patients are only minimally aware and would not meet Allen's standard for legal protection. Reliance on a personhood theory exposes most brain-damaged people to the whims of their caregivers. They are vulnerable to the unscrupulous because death does not deprive them of something they can value. On Chris Matthew's cable show, Hardball, noted prolife antagonist and author Christopher Hitchens, spoke of her as nonlife. Before her death he referred to her as the late and long-dead Terri Schiavo. Columnist John Leo notes bioethics has hardened into an activist ideology that pervades the medical world, the schools, and government.
The Schiavo case has had drastic consequences for the disabled, who have been virtually written out of the human race. The media seldom focused on disability groups, such as Not Dead Yet, who argued that Terri was being denied her rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). They repeatedly questioned why the law had not been raised in any of the court actions. They cited a federal regulation that says that the ADA does not give the guardian of a disabled person the right to refuse treatment. Several Congressmen alluded to ADA but failed to act.
The disabled correctly stress that the debate should never center on their ability to recover or even get better. Disabled people have intrinsic value, precisely because they are living human beings. This case has made it easier for some guardians, many with a financial or emotional conflict of interest, to kill them by withholding food and water. The disabled sense that the culture is turning against them. Last winter several disability groups protested the award-winning Clint Eastwood movie Million Dollar Baby over its ending that portrayed sympathetically the assisted suicide of a female boxer who had become disabled.
Death on Demand
The courts did not care about Terri Schiavo. The American court system has become a Divine Tribunal that is recklessly out of step with the Founding Fathers. Activist judges have legislated several million abortions, homosexual marriage, and the right to die as part of the new American heritage. As in abortion, where the judiciary has consistently protected abortion on demand, they have discovered a corresponding duty to protect death on demand. The courts might base their opinions on national opinion polls, the policies of the American Medical Association or even the evolving standards of bioethics in Europe. Already two justices, Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Ginsburg are on record urging their colleagues to consider European rulings in cases before the Supreme Court.
In European hospitals, especially in Holland, euthanasia is drastically on the rise. It is not only the elderly who are at risk. Many Dutch doctors openly admit that they regularly commit eugenic infanticide on defective children. Their government's response is to urge them to create guidelines that will moderate any excesses. In line with this government apathy, the Groningen Medical Center, a pediatrics hospital, has published its own guidelines that list its standards for performing and reporting the euthanasia of newborns with serious, incurable deformities.
Polls in the United Kingdom and France show that 80% of the people support legal changes that would allow patients who endure extreme suffering from terminal illness to request medical assistance in ending their lives. In Europe the debate has progressed from not whether euthanasia is right or wrong but how to regulate it.
Death Choices
The Right to Die movement has been busy changing the public's perception of death. It has caused state and federal lawmakers to dismiss the rights to life and recovery for many disabled and handicapped people. Since 1980 the Hemlock Society has promoted itself as an organization devoted to the concept of death with dignity. Now known as the End-of-Life Choices, they employ the same rhetoric that has worked so well for abortion. Choices has conditioned the American people through its well-chosen language of death and dying so that elderly fear being a burden to their children and do not want to linger in an unfulfilling state of vegetation and distress. They wish to provide civil and criminal immunity to physicians, pharmacists, and people who are present to assist the patient (in committing suicide). The medical community, which is sinking under the weight of exorbitantly rising prices, government regulations and the pressure to ration care, might eventually see euthanasia as a means of escaping the implosion of their bureaucratic infrastructure.
Life Preservers
The Catholic Church has always consistently opposed euthanasia in all of its forms. In 1995 Pope John Paul II wrote the encyclical The Gospel of Life, which deemed euthanasia a crime that no human law can claim to legitimize. The Pope taught that there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose laws for euthanasia by conscientious objection.
At the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations conference, held in Rome in March of 2004, the Pope made a profound statement on PVS. It is a patient ethical document stating that removing the feeding tube from persons in a Persistent Vegetative State was immoral and no quality of life could justify euthanasia by removal. He reaffirmed the moral imperative of care and rehabilitation for these patients. The Pope added that the terminally ill who exhibit no evident sign of self-awareness or of awareness of the environment and seem unable to interact with others or react to specific stimuli, still retain their human dignity in all its fullness.
The Catholic Church teaches that feeding tubes are ordinary treatment and not subject to the limitations placed on extraordinary means. The Conference of Catholic Bishops said food and water are always required while extraordinary means are not.
This contrasts with the culture of death, which promotes the idea of advanced directives in the form of a living will. Living wills can mislead persons into forfeiting their basic obligation to preserve their own lives. A person who leaves instructions which do not provide for food and water is signing a suicide warrant that is against the moral law.
Shadows of Life
Terri Schiavo was just one tree in the forest of life. As John Donne's poem No Man is An Island underscores, her court-sanctioned execution diminishes all human life. Her case matters as symbol and substance, writes Cal Thomas. It is only the latest in a long series that forces people to choose between two philosophies of life. According to Thomas they are the Christian respect for life and the Darwinian philosophy that regards man as matter and energy, shaped by pure chance in a random universe, evolving from slime with no Author of Life, no purpose for living beyond pleasure and with no future but the grave.
Many agree that the moral test of government is how it treats those who are in the dawn of life, those in the twilight of life, and those who are in the shadows of life. The country seems to be failing this test.
This item 6619 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
