Sanctity of Life

Wesley Smith blog

I have been reading stories about the oral arguments in the Supreme Court yesterday in Gonzales v. Oregon. It is often said that predictions cannot be made based on oral arguments. Bunk. In every appellate case in which I have been involved or observed, it was easy to discern at least the general state of play. And from what I have read, it looks like a closely divided court. Indeed, the swing vote may be Justice O’Conner or her replacement.

Justice Ginsberg’s response to the truth that non controlled substances could be used in assisted suicide thereby permitting Oregon’s law to continue on got me thinking about something. She responded that these other methods might not be so gentle. Whether true or untrue, that becomes a policy decision, not a judicial one.

Ginsberg is an elite member of the elite, as are most members of the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary. This is why, particularly with social or cultural issues, the courts so often reflect the cultural values of the upper strata. (Again, this is a general statement, not an all-inclusive one).
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Wesley Smith blog

I have always believed that Terri Schiavo could hear. This was based on conversations I had with people who were with her, and on the videos posted on the Internet. One in particular struck me: Terri is asked to open her eyes. There is a pause. Her eyes remain shut. Then, they flutter. Then, she opens her eyes. Then, she opens them so wide it wrinkes her forehead. This was no mere reflex.

After the autopsy, those who supported her dehydration pointed to the finding that she was probably blind. Therefore, they said, she could not have reacted to her mother’s love.

But she could have if she could hear.

This study (subscription only) demonstrates that unconscious people appear to hear, or at least, their brains react to speech almost like a conscious person’s. Whether they can interpret these sounds is not known.

As far as I am concerned, this shouldn’t matter. A human life has intrinsic value simply because it is. But some don’t believe that. Hence, this study should provide definite food for thought in the ongoing struggle over the intrinsic value of all human life and in establishing proper ethical approaches to caring for those with profound cognitive disabilities.

From Wesley Smith blog.

I have known about this for some time, but because I didn’t want to be guilty of the same hyping that is so often engaged in by some therapeutic cloning proponents, I waited until it was published in a peer reviewed journal. Now it has been and the news is HUGE: Korean scientists have used umbilical cord blood stem cells to restore feeling and mobility to a spinal cord injury patient. I have no link, but I do have the report published in Cythotherapy, (2005) Vol 7. No. 4, 368-373.

The patient is a woman who has been paraplegic from an accident for more than 19 years. (Complete paraplegia of the 10th thoracic vertebra.) She had surgery and also an infusion of umbilical cord blood stem cells. Note the stunning benefits: “The patient could move her hips and feel her hip skin on day 15 after transplantation. On day 25 after transplantation her feet responded to stimulation. On post operative day (POD) 7, motor activity was noticed and improved gradually in her lumbar paravertebral and hip muscles. She could maintain an upright position by herself on POD 13. From POD 15 she began to elevate both lower legs about 1 cm, and hip flexor muscle activity gradually improved until POD 41.” It goes on from there in very technical language.
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Pittsburgh, PA (LifeNews.com) — Some adult stem cell success stories are raising new questions about whether there’s a need to explore unproven embryonic stem cell research. In what’s being hailed as a groundbreaking study, scientists at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh have discovered that adult stem cells have the same ability to multiply as embryonic stem cells.

The discovery means that adult stem cells could play an important therapeutic role. Before this research, it was generally believed that embryonic stem cells had a greater capacity to multiply than adult stem cells.
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Catholic Citizens

Blind, Deaf, and Dumb: If Terri Schiavo had been dehydrated to death at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, would Dick Durbin be reading her autopsy report from the Senate floor?
6/19/2005 3:23:00 PM
By American Spectator – George Neumayr

If Terri Schiavo had been dehydrated to death at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Dick Durbin would be reading her autopsy report from the Senate floor. It would be an occasion for great moral anguish. How did the U.S. sink so low as to adopt such Nazi-like callousness toward disabled prisoners of war? one could imagine him saying. Instead, Democrats — even as they spent part of the week crassly celebrating, with news of Schiavo’s autopsy report in hand, the human rights abuse of euthanasia against the disabled — are in a moral lather over the paucity of proper air conditioning terrorists receive at Guantanamo Bay.

link to legal brief: http://www.usccb.org/ogc/ashcroft2.pdf — Catholic Bishops Conference, Other Organizations, File Brief in Assisted Suicide Case WASHINGTON (May 6, 2005)

In a friend-of-the court brief filed today in the United States Supreme Court, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and other religious organizations declared that the U.S. Attorney General was correct in finding that assisted suicide is not a legitimate medical practice under the Controlled Substances Act. The amici asked the Supreme Court to reverse a Ninth Circuit decision striking down the Attorney General’s interpretation of the Act. The high court is expected to render a decision on the case, Gonzales v. State of Oregon, next term.

“The Attorney General’s conclusion that there is a difference between assisting suicide and managing pain, and that the former is not a legitimate medical purpose within the meaning of the Controlled Substances Act…while the latter is, is not only eminently reasonable but also supported by longstanding medical practice and past interpretation of the Act,” the brief said. “Enforcing the distinction leads to improvements in patient care. Blurring the distinction has been harmful to patients and jeopardized their care. Government does not serve the public interest or the common good by facilitating the killing of innocent people, regardless of their medical condition.” The brief noted that medicine by its very definition aims to prevent illness, to heal, and to alleviate pain.
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“Evil is always done under the appearance of goodness.”

The American Spectator George Neumayr 4/1/2005

The initial event that disabled Terri Schiavo didn’t end up killing her. But in her obituary notice, what will the cause of death read? Will it read: murder? It should. The heart attack that disabled her didn’t doom her; a husband without a heart did.

Under judge-made law, euthanasia has become America’s most astonishing form of premeditated murder, a cold-blooded crime in which husbands can kill their wives and even turn them into accomplices to it through the telepathy of “their wishes.” To wonder if we’re on the slippery slope sounds like an obtuse moral compliment at this point. The truth is we’re at the bottom of the slope and have been for quite some time, standing dumbly as the bodies of innocent humans pile up around us. As we sift through them — puzzling over how they got so numerous — we’re reduced to mumbling sophistries about compassion and consent.

This is the “humane holocaust” of which Malcolm Muggeridge wrote, a culture that kills the weak, from deaf unborn children to mute disabled women, and calls it mercy. Those responsible for this humane holocaust look into the mirror and see Gandhi, but it is Hitler who glances back. If someone had taken the passages of Mein Kampf that speak of euthanizing “unfortunates” and inserted them into the columns from newspapers and magazines cheering Schiavo’s death, would anyone have known the difference?

WorldNetDaily.com

On Good Friday, as Terri Schiavo lay dying of thirst in Woodside Hospice, Gabriel Keys took her a cup of water. Gabriel was arrested, handcuffed and taken away.

Apparently, no one taught Gabriel that you do not disobey a judge’s order, even to bring water to someone dying of thirst. As he is 10 years old, he is probably not yet conversant with the new morality, where a corporal work of mercy can be a crime. Perhaps his parents filled his mind with such subversive texts as, “Whoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones, a cup of cold water” shall not lose eternal life.

For Terri Schiavo will not have died a natural death. She will have been put to death by the state. The coroner’s report should read: This was a state-sanctioned killing of a woman because she was brain-damaged, and the method of execution was by starvation and denial of water. These are methods most of us would protest if imposed on the Beltway snipers.

National Review Online

There was an honest, forthright case for ending the life of Terri Schiavo. It was that her life no longer had any value, for herself or others, and that ending it — the quicker the better — would spare everyone misery. We disagree with that view, holding it wiser to stick with the Judeo-Christian tradition on the sanctity of innocent life. But the people who made this case deserve some credit for straightforwardness.

But while the public may have agreed with the removal of Schiavo’s feeding and hydration tube, apparently there are limits to the public’s willingness to tolerate euthanasia — and apparently its defenders recognized these limits. So we saw euphemism after euphemism deployed to cloud the issues.

Perhaps chief among these was the fiction that we were “letting her die.” On March 18, Schiavo was in no medical danger of death. She was profoundly brain-damaged (although just how profoundly remains unknown), but she was not in a coma or on a respirator. She was not being kept alive by artificial means, any more than small children are kept alive by artificial means when their parents feed them. Her body was functioning, there is some reason to believe she was minimally conscious, and she was responsive to stimuli (it’s been reported she was actually being administered pain medication). She had devoted parents and siblings who were willing to care for her. She could easily have gone on in these conditions for many years. She was not close to dying. For death to arrive, she would have to be killed.