Beyond Terri Schiavo

Yesterday the martyred woman's executioner, Judge George Greer, in a speech at the University of Pennsylvania yesterday (Does it strike anybody else as odd that a minor Florida state court judge is getting out-of-state speaking gigs?), actually said this:

The Florida judge who presided over the Terri Schiavo case and ruled her feeding tube should be removed told a bioethics symposium that lawmakers are ill-equipped to make right-to-die decisions.

Pinellas County Circuit Judge George W. Greer, in brief remarks at the University of Pennsylvania on Monday, said that 30 state and federal judges painstakingly reviewed the many volumes of testimony and evidence submitted in the divisive case.

But state lawmakers who passed "Terri's Law" to have the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube reinserted did so with "little to no debate" and with "significant arm-twisting," he said.

"Do you want that process ... or do you want a deliberative, court evidence-driven process where it can be reviewed?" Greer asked.

Um, is this a trick question? Might it not be a hint that lawmakers don't require interminable epochs of rationalization to recognize that it is morally abhorrent to put a helpless but living woman to a brutal, torturous death? Are we a representative democracy or a judicial dictatorship? And isn't the latter far more likely to produce wanton injustice, up to and including the slaughter of the innocent, when ghouls like Judge Greer are invested with such enormous power?

Well, the next benchmark on this particular slippery slope has arisen:

The bioethics committee at St. Luke's Hospital in Houston, Texas has decreed that Andrea Clarke should die. Indeed, after a closed-door hearing, it ordered all further medical efforts to sustain her life while at St. Luke's to cease. As a consequence, Clarke's life support, required because of a heart condition and bleeding on the brain, is to be removed unilaterally even though she is not unconscious and her family wants treatment to continue.

Andrea Clarke may become an early victim of one of the biggest agendas in bioethics: Futile-care theory, a.k.a., medical futility. The idea behind futile-care theory goes something like this: In order to honor personal autonomy, if a patient refuses life-sustaining treatment, that wish is sacrosanct. But if a patient signed an advance medical directive instructing care to continue — indeed, even if the patient can communicate that he or she wants life-sustaining treatment — it can be withheld anyway if the doctors and/or the ethics committee believes that the quality of the patient's life renders it not worth living. [emphases added]

"Futile care" - such a typical euphemism for a policy so heinous. So much for "death with dignity." And personal choice. And the Hypocratic Oath. If you're in an accident or suffer a debilitating health condition, you, and your family, effectively lose control over your own life. Whether you live or die becomes not a personal decision but a bureaucratic diktat. And more and more doctors are embracing the cult of death.

As the author, Wesley Smith, points out, there's no way to know how many hospitals around the country practice "futile care." And as you might have suspected by now, this phenomenon is considerably worse than the particulars of the Terri Schiavo case:

We should also note that the Clarke controversy isn't anything like the Terri Schiavo case. Schiavo's tube-supplied food and fluids were ordered withdrawn (supposedly) to carry out her wishes. But Clarke apparently wants to live and her family all agree that she should continue to be sustained. In other words, it is as if Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, agreed to maintain Terri's feeding tube but a hospital ethics committee overruled their decisions and doctors removed the tube anyway. [emphasis added]

Michael Schiavo - affectionately known here as The Scumbag - debased the courts by finding a judge who would off his disabled wife for him rather than simply doing her in himself like scumbag husbands used to have to do in the BT (Before Terri) days. Thus did homocide become the newest "constitutional right". But while Mr. Smith says that the legality of internal ethics committees acting as quasi-courts to order unilateral treatment-refusal remains uncertain in most states, I think the Schiavo precedent abrogates that ambiguity. If a scumbag like Michael Schiavo was able to find a judge to do his murderous bidding, how much easier will it be for hospitals to do so, especially since the trail has already been substantially blazed?

Smith finishes with a chilling quote:

As German physician Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland wrote presciently in 1806, "It is not up to [the doctor] whether . . . life is happy or unhappy, worthwhile or not, and should he incorporate these perspectives into his trade . . . the doctor could well become the most dangerous person in the state."

The doctor and the judge, you mean. With the mass-murder mentality entrenched in these two core and pivotal professions, who would need serial killers anymore? Heck, who would need al Qaeda? And what incentive would there be to obtain and maintain full health care insurance coverage with the built-in knowledge that it would include an involuntary toe-tag? Hospitals would become random Roach Motels - you check in, but you don't check out. Steven King couldn't devise a scenario any creepier.

And to think that Andrea Clarke is being euthanized by a "bioethics" committee.

Guess we can cross George Orwell off the list while we're at it.