- Increasingly across America, the sick and elderly, some
with terminal illnesses, are being murdered simply by withholding food
and water.
-
- When a new edition of his book "Forced Exit, The
Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder" was published,
author Wesley J. Smith couldn1t have known that America was so far down
that slope that Florida courts were ordering the killing, in a most barbaric
way, of a disabled but conscious woman.
-
- Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and
an attorney and consultant for the International Task Force on Euthanasia
and Assisted Suicide, wrote the first version of the book six years ago.
-
- He decided that an update was needed as a result of the
increased pressure by advocates of assisted suicide and those backing euthanasia,
which they call "mercy killing."
-
- Smith notes that "health care" policies have
gone well beyond euthanasia at the request of the sick person. Today doctors
and families are taking the life-and-death decision into their own hands
and purposely withholding food and water to kill the patient.
-
- Often the intention might be good, such as to save the
patient from a terminal disease and pain. But the result, Smith says, is
the same: It is an act of murder. Even if the patient consents, euthanasia
is a form of suicide.
-
- Already, assisted suicide and euthanasia have been made
legal or deemed acceptable in European countries, as well as Australia
and South Africa.
-
- The Doctor Decides
-
- In America, he writes, there is now a movement promoting
what is known as the "futile care" theory - when a doctor decides
on his own that when a patient1s quality of life is not worth living, further
medical care would be futile and could be denied.
-
- "Today," Smith writes, "there is a systematic,
nationwide attempt by many in the bioethics movement to impose futile care
upon the populace through formal hospital protocols that give anonymous
ethics committees the power to turn thumbs up or thumbs down to wanted
medical treatment deemed 'inappropriate.1"
-
- Those protocols, he warns, are already designed to "stack
the deck" against the patient if the doctor or hospital wants to refuse
treatment.
-
- Now a new threat has emerged, dramatized by the horrific
case of Theresa Schiavo: the demand that patients deemed no longer worth
saving be killed by the inhuman process of "dehydration" - refusing
nourishment to conscious, cognitively disabled people who need feeding
tubes to stay alive. In other words, condemning them to an excruciatingly
painful death by starvation.
-
- The practice has become commonplace in America, Smith
told NewsMax.com.
-
- "Dehydration of cognitively disabled patients occurs
in all 50 states in the United States of America," Smith explained.
-
- "Quite often it occurs to conscious people who could
feel the 10- to 14-day agony that dehydration entails. The only way it
gets stopped is if family members disagree on the medical course. Absent
family disagreement, this happens as a matter of routine."
-
- When Smith published the new edition of his book, the
case of Theresa Schiavo, who collapsed from cardiac arrest in 1990, had
only just been brought to his attention. Since then it has become a national
cause celebre thanks to a court decree, temporarily stalled by an injunction,
ordering that she be put to death by dehydration.
-
- 'When Is That Bitch Gonna Die?1
-
- The case of Terri Schiavo is a classic example of how
far America has traveled down the road to legalized euthanasia and officially
sanctioned death sentences for the disabled.
-
- Smith reviewed the Schiavo case for NewsMax.com:
-
- "In Florida, in order to dehydrate somebody there
has to be a finding that the patient is unconscious, which is what Judge
Greer has done in the Schiavo case.
-
- "But if anybody has seen a video of Schiavo available
on Terrisfight.com [now Terrisfight.org], the video shows they will see
that she is no way unconscious. An unconscious person is utterly unreactive
- in fact that1s how it1s basically defined in Florida law."
-
- On one video a doctor is shown asking Terri, who has
her eyes closed, "Please open your eyes, Terri" - and her eyes
flutter and open.
-
- In another video her mother comes over to her bed, leans
down and says, "Hi, sweetie, how are you?" and Terri looks over,
sees her mom and gets a huge smile on her face.
-
- That, says Smith, is not a mere reflex; "that is
recognition of a mother and the enjoyment of being loved. To say that she1s
unconscious is unconscionable."
-
- Incredibly, the court has these facts, Smith said.
-
- "And the court has other facts that it is also ignoring.
Michael Schiavo, Terri1s husband, filed a medical malpractice suit regarding
his wife1s injury that caused her to be cognitively disabled. He promised
that he would provide her care for the rest of her natural life because
she1s not on intensive care or anything of that sort. He brought to the
jury a rehabilitation expert with a plan to help Terri get better, but
as soon as the money was in the bank, which was $750,000 in a trust fund
for Terri," he refused to allow any rehabilitative treatments whatsoever.
-
- "He also got $300,000 more for loss of consortium,
and the money went to lawyers," Smith explained.
-
- "Not one day, not one hour, not one minute of rehabilitation
time has Terri been given so she could get better. It1s unconscionable.
-
- "This despite that there are doctors testifying
under penalty of perjury, not only is Terri not unconscious, but that they
believe she could be better. There1s a speech pathologist who has testified
most recently under penalty of perjury that he believes that Terri can
be weaned from the feeding tube."
-
- Smith said, however, that "as soon as the money
was in the bank, Michael put a 'do not resuscitate' order on the chart,
realizing back in the early 1990s he would inherit $750,000 if Terri died,
and began to refuse medical treatment such as antibiotics for infections
and so forth. In 1998, when Terri didn't die he filed a request with Judge
Greer to be allowed to remove her feeding tube, and that1s how this whole
business started."
-
- In a stunning sworn affidavit, Carla Sauer Iyer, a registered
nurse who was employed at Palm Garden of Largo Convalescent Center in Largo,
Fla., from April 1995 to July 1996, while Terri Schiavo was a patient there,
testified: "Throughout my time at Palm Gardens, Michael Schiavo was
focused on Terri's death. Michael would say 'When is she going to die?'
'Has she died yet?' and 'When is that bitch gonna die?'"
-
- Others at Palm Garden also testified similarly in sworn
affidavits. All swore that Terri had spoken to them frequently and backed
Iyer's recollections.
-
- Zeroing in on Michael Schiavo's possible motives, Smith
emphasized that it was important to realize that Michael Schiavo is engaged
to be married.
-
- "He has had one baby by his fiancée, she
is pregnant with a second child, they live together and want to get married,
and the reason they can1t is that Michael's wife is still alive.
-
- "It1s an astonishing statement of insensitivity
that a judge would allow this man with incredible conflicts of interest
both financial, if any money's left from that trust fund, and personal.
-
- "It1s outrageous," he added, "to [allow
him to] have anything to do with how his wife is treated, and yet Judge
Greer just ignores these clear conflicts of interest, refuses to allow
Terri1s blood family, who want to care for her for the rest of her life
and want to give her the therapy that might make her better, to be her
guardians, and instead is bound and determined and intent on dehydrating
this helpless citizen to death."
-
- Michael Schiavo has accused his in-laws, Bob and Mary
Schindler, of trying to control his wife's assets, and "the Schindlers
now suggest their son-in-law tried to strangle their daughter the night
she collapsed and that's why he has fought so hard to keep her quiet,"
the Orlando Sentinel reported. Schiavo's attorney has denounced the accusations
as "malicious" and "garbage."
-
- In late August Gov. Jeb Bush asked a judge to delay setting
a date for removal of the feeding tube so a guardian could be appointed.
-
- The governor's intervention is "crazy," Michael
Schiavo said. "This case has been in litigation for five years, and
all of a sudden Gov. Bush wants to be involved? This isn't his concern,
and he should stay out of it."
-
- 'An Extremely Agonizing Death'
-
- In his book, Wesley J. Smith describes the intense suffering
imposed on those being starved to death.
-
- "Proponents of dehydration contend that deaths by
dehydration are peaceful," Smith wrote.
-
- Noting that "the patients we are discussing are
not terminally ill" and that those who are conscious can feel hunger
and thirst, Smith quotes Dr. William Burke, a neurologist in St. Louis,
who described the agonizing process.
-
- "A conscious person would feel it (dehydration)
just as you and I would. They will go into seizures. Their skin cracks,
their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because
of the drying of the mucous membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue
because of the drying out of the stomach lining. They feel the pangs of
hunger and thirst. Imagine going one day without a glass of water. Death
by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing
death."
-
- The next step, Smith predicts, will be the abandonment
of dehydration in favor a much simpler and faster way to kill - death by
lethal injection, now popular in prison death chambers.
-
- In his book Smith concludes by asking if we will "take
the hard turn down the slippery slope towards a coarsening of our view
of the afflicted, the dying, the chronically ill, the disabled, and those
in pain or depression, to the point where we feel they have a duty to die
and get out of the way?
-
- "Will we choose to love each other, or abandon each
other?"
-
- In the case of Terri Schiavo, the authorities have chosen
abandonment.
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