WHO GETS TO LIVE AND WHO HAS TO DIE?
I’ve never gone without food for more than a couple of days. Back when I was young and broke and there was nothing in the house.
But it hurt. It really hurt.
Sometimes it still does, if I miss a meal or two, or if I’m trying to cut back. But you know how that is. We all know what it’s like to be hungry.
To feel those pangs.
Those natural cravings.
The need for food.
But we don’t know what it’s like to be Terri Schiavo. None of us do. None of us know what it’s like to be her, to be inside her head. We don’t know if she’s in there.
We don’t know if it hurts her. We don’t know if it doesn’t.
But they’re starving her anyway. And who knows how many others they starve. All of human experience tells us it causes pain and suffering to go without food, and we’re starving invalids to death because we’ve decided their lives aren’t worth living.
Murderers get a lethal injection because the courts say anything else is inhumane. And yet the same courts issue orders that doom the handicapped to starvation. And we pretend – because we can’t truly know – that it causes them no discomfort.
Wouldn’t it be faster just to burn them alive? Or drown them? Or cut their throats?
Must we really drag their suffering out for two weeks, just so we can pretend our consciences are clean?
It’s murder, plain and simple. If I do something to you and it causes you to die, that’s murder. That’s blood on my hands.
And if Terri Schiavo dies, her blood is going to be on somebody’s hands.
Homicide is never “death with dignity,” it’s always homicide. Letting somebody starve to death is not being compassionate, it is being sadistic.
And amidst all this national hoopla about whether or not Terri Schiavo should have the feeding tube put back in, I can’t believe we kill people this way. I can’t believe there are standards and laws about euthenizing stray dogs yet humans are put down in this most barbarous of fashions.
And don’t tell me it doesn’t hurt them.
It is illogical to think any such thing, and to presume that the primal wiring for hunger is short-circuited in the fundamentally handicapped is nothing more than wishful thinking. The most simple of animals suffer from hunger, isn’t it reasonable to expect that the most simple or dysfunctional of humans would do the same?
And how do they pick which ones die? What is the standard? What prevents us from roaming through state hospitals for the fundamentally handicapped killing them at will? Is a child with severe cerebral palsy any more or less deserving of starvation than an adult who had a heart attack?
Sure, these people will die without their feeding tubes, without being fed by others.
But so would any baby. Or some elderly people. Or somebody with two broken wrists.
When do we start killing them?
When do we start installing gas chambers at the Alzheimer’s wards? When do we stop feeding people who are – forgive the harsh words – mentally retarded?
If we believe we have the power to say someone with a certain type of handicap doesn’t deserve to live, when do we start passing judgement on other types of handicap?
Isn’t the history of medical care that we typically underestimate the humanity of patients? Didn’t we used to put babies with Down syndrome into asylums to raise them like animals? Didn’t we regret that when we learned what full lives they can live when raised normally, with interaction and love? Haven’t we warehoused the insane and the debilitated?
Isn’t it possible that people who can’t feed themselves, or speak or focus or walk or laugh or cry or sit or stand, are still people?
Isn’t life life?
In fact, it is. And we are commanded by our faith and our culture to feed the hungry and comfort the afflicted. Hippocrates great injunction to, “First, do no harm,” carries with it the responsibility to act if failing to do so would cause harm.
This backhanded killing is unacceptable.
For Terry Schiavo, or for anyone.
It is inconvenient to care for the severely disabled, and expensive, and completely bothersome and unrewarding. Yet none of that is justification for homicide.
And this is homicide. It is an execution.
An execution carried out not with the broad range of humane means available to modern medicine, but by the barbaric and torturous relic of a darker era.
We starve them to death.
Shame on us.
We starve them to death because we have decided they are no longer truly human. We starve them to death because we have decided to play God.
We starve them to death because we are wrong.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2003
