Letting People Die to Keep a Vegetable Alive. (Revised 3/22/05 to reflect congressional and federal court actions.) In perhaps the most contemptible proof of Republicans' moral confusions ever recorded, the Republican Party dragged members of Congress and the President back to Washington from Easter break in order to keep a human vegetable "alive" at astoundingly excessive cost, all the while normal people are allowed to die by the million for want of the kind of resources this profligate society is wasting on the humanly-dead.
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There once was a woman in Florida who suffered a heart attack in 1990. That's 15 years ago. She has been mentally unconscious ever since, but has been kept "alive" by modern medicine, tho she exists only in a "persistent vegetative state" from which no reputable doctor has ever said she will fully emerge to resume a normal life. Keeping her "alive" thru modern medical miracles has already cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, money taken first from a fund for a medical-malpractice action and now from public sources and the limited resources of a private hospice.

Who's paying for Terri Schiavo's care?
Taxpayers -- and a St. Petersburg area hospice, which provides daily care for free.

Money that Schiavo's husband, Michael, received as part of a medical malpractice lawsuit in his wife's case in 1993 is almost gone ....

Of the $700,000 payment, only about $50,000 is left .... The rest went to pay for medical care for Schiavo, who has been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, and for legal fees in the battle over her fate, she said.

Medicaid, the state and federal program that pays medical costs for the poor and indigent, has been picking up the tab for Schiavo's medications for two years, Bushnell said, while the hospice provides care for free.

Louise Cleary, spokeswoman for Woodside Hospice, the 72-bed center where Terri Schiavo has been in Pinellas Park, said she could not discuss Schiavo's case, but the average cost of care is about $80,000 a year.

Contrast this first with what we always would have done, in a caring family or society, to someone in her condition.
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We would have put her lovingly to bed and watched over her to see if she recovered consciousness. We would have let her sleep, and hoped, or prayed, or both, that she would wake up and greet us with a smile on her face. But if nature, or God, did not intend her to wake up, we would have waited patiently, and sadly, until she died. That might, at the outside, have taken three weeks. We are now in the SIXTEENTH YEAR(!) of Terry Schiavo's subsistence at death's door, where she hangs between death and life. But she will, the very best doctors say, never come back to life — real, human, fully functional life.
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Contrast the extraordinary, I would say EXTREMELY EXCESSIVE, concern the Republican Party shows this useless shell of a former human being with the utterly callous unconcern that same party shows for the helpless of the Third World. The Hunger Site says that:

24,000 people die of hunger each day[.]

Other organizations say that more people, mostly children, die of starvation (38,000 a day, 41,000 a day, even 50,000 a day, possibly fewer — but not a LOT fewer — kids die of starvation each day. How much would it cost to save their lives?
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"Save the Children" has 'adopt-a-child' programs at $28 a month, which equates with $336 a year. "Christian Children's Fund" has programs at $24 a month, which equates with $288 a year.
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Terri Schiavo's legal expenses and medical care have already cost a bedrock minimum of $650,000. Let's divide that thru by $336 a year, for Save the Children's program: that yields 1,934 YEARS of care to one starving kid in the Third World. The equivalent in Christian Children's Fund terms is 2,256 years, of care to a single starving child.
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Plainly that is not a rational measure, since no one remains a child for two millennia. So let's average the 1,934 years for Save the Children with the 2,256 years for Christian Children's Fund: that comes to 2,095 years. So, the money that has ALREADY been expended for the VEGETABLE Terri Schiavo (whose name, in Italian, is pronounced skee-YOV-o, not SHY-vo) would equate with life-saving aid to 2,095 different kids in the Third World for a full year — 2,095 NORMAL kids, with a future lifetime of prospects and accomplishments, could be taken care of for the money this idiotic, profligate, Republican-dominated society is THROWING AWAY on a VEGETABLE, who has NO prospects and NO accomplishments going forward! Appalling.
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Moreover, the Republican Party, which called an extraordinary session of Congress to pass legislation specific to one person — which Congress is never supposed to do; all laws are supposed to be of general application — refuses to give us universal healthcare, arguing cost! Yet it wants to continue to spend an outrageous, indeed INSANE amount of money to keep a vegetable alive, while denying much more modest healthcare expenses to poor and hard-pressed middle class Americans! The Republicans' insistence on giving federal courts jurisdiction in this one case is contemptible in the extreme, not least for the hypocrisy of people who claim to be worried about federal intrusions on areas of state responsibility!
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And it didn't even work!
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The federal judge who considered the arguments yesterday ruled against intervening to reinsert the feeding tube! Now the idiotic parents are going to appeal that ruling, using up more resources, public and private, on an appeal that will probably (tho not necessarily) also fail. If that happens, they then plan to appeal to the Supreme Court of the United States, which will probably also refuse to reverse the decisions in now-TWENTY other court cases!
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The Republicans' insane action is also extremely unpopular. A poll today (March 22nd) on iWon.com shows that 71% of respondents thought Congress was wrong to act as it did. Only 19% thought it was right, the remaining 10% being unsure. This is fully in line with an AOL poll also today that shows 68% of people voting agreed with the federal court's refusal to act. Consider that iWon.com is a more-Republican site than many others (I have noted on many occasions that iWon polls tilt about 6% higher toward the Republican stance than Gallup and other non-Internet polls), and consider as well that all Internet polls are by their nature biased toward the point of view of the middle class and rich, that is, more conservative than the general population, because most of the poor don't have computers at home. So the Republican Party rallied all its resources for an action which the great majority of Americans disapprove of, proving that the Republican leadership of today is profoundly out of touch.
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Terri Schiavo is a vegetable, defined at Dictionary.com thus "Offensive Slang. One who is severely impaired mentally and physically, as by brain injury or disease." Tho such a use might be 'offensive' to some, it is nonetheless extremely widespread, and properly.
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The "plug" on that particular vegetable should have been pulled YEARS AGO, and the money, psychic energy, and political influence wasted on that worthless issue should instead have been diverted to the really living. Life is for the living, the sensate, people who can appreciate life. Life without awareness — present or future — is not human life. Pull the plug. Instead of wasting public resources and prolonging their daughter's uselessness and drain upon society, Mrs. Schiavo's parents should donate her organs, as to let the parts live on in people desperately in need of a new beginning: heart, liver, kidneys, lungs, corneas — everything another human being needs. There are people now really living who need functioning human organs. Terri Schiavo is dead, as a person. Let go. Let her pass in dignity.
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Her husband isn't trying to kill her from hatred but merely trying to let her go gently into that good nite where nature intends her to go.
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Give such of her tissues as properly function to the living, and let her death gain meaning from giving life to people who are really alive.
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We honor her life best in sharing it with others.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,524.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:02 PM