Coup de Grace
For me any possibility of sympathy for Michael Schiavo was given the coup de grace when he would not let her parents be present at the moment of her death.
This was totally inhuman.
I have a strong belief that people should be welcomed into the world and that they should have someone close to them when they leave.
The gathering evidence about the state of the Schiavo’s marriage, the quality, or lack of it, of her treatment, Schiavo’s refusal to have relevant and illuminating tests done on his wife plus the fact that he maintained custody of his wife even though he had several affairs and had finally settled into a common law marriage which had produced two children unequivocally point to the fact that Michael Schiavo and his actions should undergo the most thorough scrutiny.
The possibilities range from murder to gross inhumanity.
And by “thorough scrutiny” I don’t mean pulling a few statistics out of the air along with a few cliches like “Keep the government out of it” and “It happens all the time” plus a few quotes and a large dose of feelings.
The inabilty to think things through is yet another instance of the negative legacy 60′s. And if you want to see how our intellectual level has fallen over the past 150 years, read the Lincoln-Douglas Debates and the quality of their argument and which were given in front of ordinary people.
Euthanasia , as several people have mentioned, will be to the next 30 years what abortion was to the 70′s and 80′s since the first Baby Boomer turns 60 on 1 January 2006.
It will be intereting to correlate their enthusiasm for pulling the plug as they get older.
One of the core questions is, “Does a person have the right to life just by the fact that they are human or are there other qualifications that have to be met such as the ability to feed ones self?”
Pardon my dark humor but I have this mental cartoon of a doctor saying to a “quality- of- life” Boomer that he can’t have another heart transplant because he already has had one. My mind’s eye focusses especially on the face of the Boomer.
The other question is, “Who has the power of life and death when the incapacitated person has not left a Living Will?”
That is especially relevant in this case because Michal Schiavo had a massive conflict of interest owing to his common law marriage and the two children which came from it.
Why was that allowed to happen?
The murder of Terri Schiavo, and that is what it was, is the prelude to a massive and intense struggle that will go on for the next twenty five years.
