Dee Dee Warren
November 7th 2007, 09:13 PM
November 06, 2007
Devaluing Life
Terry Schiavo's case brought to national attention the kinds of practices that happen quietly all the time. Severely injured patients are treated as broken instruments that have no value because they don't function properly. They are deemed life unworthy of life. Wesley J. Smith recounts just a few cases where patients slated for Terry's fate were found in time to be functioning at a higher capacity than doctors had thought.
The point isn't so much that doctors make mistakes. The point is to look at these cases and be shocked at how the weakest and most vulnerable among us are devalued. Their humanity isn't valued and instead there is a rising movement to treat them as mere objects.
In this climate, Jesse Ramirez-type stories can become more numerous, yet still barely penetrate the public consciousness. Increasingly, we hear about sustenance being withdrawn within days of a serious brain injury. And now that these helpless people are deemed dehydratable, there is a growing clamor in the professional journals to transform them into natural resources to be exploited like a corn crop--as sources of vital organs and subjects for experimentation. To show how far this line of thinking has already gone, bioethicists writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics recently advocated transplanting pig organs into people diagnosed with PVS to determine the safety and efficacy of xenotransplantation (the transplantation of animal organs into human patients).
A serious cultural consequence of the Terri Schiavo drama has been the devaluation of the weakest among us into a disposable and exploitable caste. But it is not too late to reverse the tide. Jesse Ramirez, Haleigh Poutre, and the groundbreaking research into the treatment of serious brain injury are powerful reminders that where there is life, there is hope. Those who understand that all persons, regardless of capacity, deserve to be treated as beloved members of the human family have good reason to shake off the Schiavo rout and return to the fray.
http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2007/11/devaluing-life.html
STR allows the posting of their articles in full.
Devaluing Life
Terry Schiavo's case brought to national attention the kinds of practices that happen quietly all the time. Severely injured patients are treated as broken instruments that have no value because they don't function properly. They are deemed life unworthy of life. Wesley J. Smith recounts just a few cases where patients slated for Terry's fate were found in time to be functioning at a higher capacity than doctors had thought.
The point isn't so much that doctors make mistakes. The point is to look at these cases and be shocked at how the weakest and most vulnerable among us are devalued. Their humanity isn't valued and instead there is a rising movement to treat them as mere objects.
In this climate, Jesse Ramirez-type stories can become more numerous, yet still barely penetrate the public consciousness. Increasingly, we hear about sustenance being withdrawn within days of a serious brain injury. And now that these helpless people are deemed dehydratable, there is a growing clamor in the professional journals to transform them into natural resources to be exploited like a corn crop--as sources of vital organs and subjects for experimentation. To show how far this line of thinking has already gone, bioethicists writing in the Journal of Medical Ethics recently advocated transplanting pig organs into people diagnosed with PVS to determine the safety and efficacy of xenotransplantation (the transplantation of animal organs into human patients).
A serious cultural consequence of the Terri Schiavo drama has been the devaluation of the weakest among us into a disposable and exploitable caste. But it is not too late to reverse the tide. Jesse Ramirez, Haleigh Poutre, and the groundbreaking research into the treatment of serious brain injury are powerful reminders that where there is life, there is hope. Those who understand that all persons, regardless of capacity, deserve to be treated as beloved members of the human family have good reason to shake off the Schiavo rout and return to the fray.
http://str.typepad.com/weblog/2007/11/devaluing-life.html
STR allows the posting of their articles in full.