chose life

MS NBC got a PC jesuit to explain why the church does not forbid stopping extraordinary treatment.

As Nat Hentoff remarked, bioethicists are "apologists for death"-- like sophists of old, they are able to explain to us why we can stop
treatment. Alas, what they can't explain is why people should live.

A lot of the discussions on Schiavo are off the mark. If she was dying, I would have no problem with withholding treatment. There is
a difference between killing and allowing to die. Removing a feeding tube is killing, especially removing the feeding tube from a
woman who can swallow food...and if Schiavo could not swallow food, she would have died from aspiration pneumonia long ago...

(One PC newspaper insisted she was "dying" and gave the odds against longer life. I think the chance of living 15 years was 1 in
15,000....hello, she has lived fifteen years)....

So despite reports, she is not dying. She is merely severely disabled. All the arguments about "vegetative" state is nonsense: this is a fuzzy diagnosis that cannot be diagnosed easily, or rather, it can easily be overdiagnosed by hired guns and neurologists (a British Medical journal survey showed it was overdiagnosed 40% of the time). In other words, flip a coin to whether Sciavo is a "vegetable", and then ask: Who devised such an inhumane dehumanizing term? And why?

Language is important. That's why we discuss "A woman's choice" rather than "killing unwanted children in the womb".

Alas, we have had a generation of ethicists, doctors, and the press who now no longer have the moral vocabulary to explain why a
disabled person with little chance of improvement should nevertheless be treated with respect and even viewed with love as a child of God.

And THIS, my friends is a problem.

Peggy Noonan has the best article on this:

Our children have been reared in the age of abortion, and are coming of age in a time when seemingly respectable people are
enthusiastic for euthanasia. It cannot be good for our children, and the world they will make, that they are given this new lesson that
human life is not precious, not touched by the divine, not of infinite value.

Once you "know" that--that human life is not so special after all--then everything is possible, and none of it is good. When a society
comes to believe that human life is not inherently worth living, it is a slippery slope to the gas chamber.

Oh, but we are such a humane people. We would never do such things...

Except that this week the New York Times had an article praising a Dutch doctor who kills newborn infants...most of the victims had
meningomyelocoels, which can be treated, and who will have a fairly good IQ and fairly good quality of life...something not mentioned in the article.

But they are merely the polite tip of the iceburg. Lileks has been perusing the web, and comments:
Then there are those who brim with passion not just for the state-approved quietus, but with fury for those who oppose it. Fury and
impatience. I’m not talking about the people who regard Schiavo as brain dead and believe her guardian should be allowed to carry
out what he insists are her wishes, without the state’s intercession – I mean those who show up on message boards and comment forums sneering about vegetables-in-pampers, and have a good larf pointing at the christers with their imaginary friend in the sky who tells them that an angel will come down and give her a brain like the Wizard of Oz or somethin’. It’s this combination of nihilism,
cynicism and a flat nasty refusal to even consider the possibility of transcendence, puffed up with that brackish snarkier-than-thou style that makes the Comic Book Guy the patron saint of the Usenet.

Yes. And the bad news is that a lot of our ethicists are merely more polite in saying the same thing...things like "criteria for personhood"...."vegetative state"...."life unworthy of life"...

Who among our bishops has the guts to say: we are judged by how we treat the least of our brethren? And caring for the disabled is not a waste of money but the highest most valuable thing someone can do.


Pearl Buck, the mother of a retarded child, said it this way:
"It can be summed up perhaps, by saying that in
this world, whom cruelty prevails in so
many aspects of can life, I would act add
the choice m kill rather tharn to let live.
A retarded child, a handicapped human
being, brings its own gift to life, even to
the life of normal human being&. That
gift is comprehended in the lessons of
patience, understanding and mercy,
lessons which we all need in receive and
to practice with one another, whatever
we are."

But there is a huge issue that no one really has the guts to bring up: What if it were me. Well, not no one. Charles Krauthammar brings
it up and says he wouldn't want it. He has knowlege of suffering, so should be listened to in this matter...Indeed, who would...but....

What if God wants it? What if it was God's will that you should live completely dependent on others? What if refusing this meant that
your immortal soul -- and perhaps the souls of those around you-- would be negatively affected?

One of my Native American friends was discussing this with her medicine man...she was college educated and so knew all the pro abortion and pro euthanasia arguments. And he told her: "No. It is not the Indian way. We all have a life from the Great spirit, and we cannot take it. We all have a road to travel before we die. "

To a devout Native American believer, A child conceived is in the womb is considered there by the will of God and has a road to
travel. (A Christian would point out the verse "You knew me when I was knit in my mother's womb, you saw the path of my life").

And suffering is for a reason: To make us wise, to purify us.

Ironically, it is LILEKS who points this out-- by quoting Startrek...

I remember being horrified by him as a kid, because it seemed the
perfect smothering claustrophobia nightmare: unable to exist outside a motorized iron lung, face scarred to immobility, unable to
communicate beyond a pathetic beep. But it never occurred to us why he was still alive, why someone hadn’t slipped him the needle
or put a pillow over his face in the dark of night. That didn’t seem like an option.


No. In those days, even Hollywood recognized that sometimes disability and suffering had an ultimate reason, and that all things work to the best for those who love God and hold to his purpose.

But such hard words are rarely heard nowadays...

Yes, we have gone a long way, baby...