The Redhunter

In some of my earlier posts on the issues raised by Terri Schiavo's death, I commented on the trend toward dehumanizing descriptions of those who some want to kill. Michelle Malkin has posted part of a must-read column by Mark Steyn about the case of Robert Wendland. If you found what happened to Terri Schiavo scary, you'll find this one to be an absolute horror story:

Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland? No reason why you should. I wrote about him in this space in 1998, and had intended to return to the subject but something else always intervened — usually Bill Clinton’s penis, which loomed large, at least metaphorically, over the entire era. Mr Wendland lived in Stockton, California. He was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But Rose Wendland was busy with this and that, as one is, and assumed there was no particular urgency.

Then one day, a year later, Robert woke up. He wasn’t exactly his old self, but he could catch and throw a ball and wheel his chair up and down the hospital corridors, and both activities gave him pleasure. Nevertheless Mrs Wendland decided that she now wished to exercise her right to have him dehydrated to death. Her justification was that, while the actual living Robert — the Robert of the mid-1990s — might enjoy a simple life of ball-catching and chair-rolling, the old Robert — the pre-1993 Robert — would have considered it a crashing bore and would have wanted no part of it.

She nearly got her way. But someone at the hospital tipped off Mr Wendland’s mother and set off a protracted legal struggle in which — despite all the obstacles the California system could throw in her path — the elderly Florence Wendland was eventually successful in preventing her son being put down. He has since died of pneumonia, which is sad: the disabled often fall victim to some opportunist illness they’d have shrugged off in earlier times, as Christopher Reeve did. But that’s still a better fate than to be starved to death by order of the state.

Ouch. Later Steyn discusses the dehumanizing terminology that helped make her death possible:

Many people seem to be unusually anxious to pretend that this judicial murder (Terri Schiavo) is merely a very belated equivalent of a discreet doctor putting a hopeless case out of her misery, or to take refuge in the idea that some magisterial disinterested ‘due process’ is being played out — or as a reader wrote to me the other day: ‘Why are you fundamentalists so clueless? It’s the law, dickbrain. Michael Schiavo isn’t acting for himself; he’s been legally recognised as the person qualified to act for Terri in expressing her wishes based on her own oral declarations.’

Which sounds fine and dandy, until you uncover your ears and a lot of the genteel euphemisms and legalisms and medicalisms — ‘right to die’, ‘guardian ad litem’, ‘PVS’ — start to sound downright Orwellian. PVS means ‘persistent vegetative state’, and because it’s a grand official-sounding term it’s been accepted mostly without question by the mainstream media, even though the probate judge declared Mrs Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state without troubling to visit her and without requiring any of the routine tests, such as an MRI scan. Indeed, her husband hasn’t permitted her to be tested for anything since 1993. Think about that: this woman is being put to death without any serious medical evaluation more recent than 12 years ago.

How did we get to this point, and where are we going?

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of ‘choice’, it created a culture where it’s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren’t. Down’s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It’s foolish to think you can raise entire populations — not to mention generations of doctors — to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn’t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The ‘right to choose’ is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one.

... the Schiavo debate provides a glimpse of the Western world the day after tomorrow — a world of nonagenarian baby boomers who’ve conquered most of the common-or-garden diseases and instead get stricken by freaky protracted colossally expensive chronic illnesses; a world of more and more dependants, with fewer and fewer people to depend on. In Europe, where demographic reality means that in a generation or so all the dependants will be elderly European Christians and most of the fellows they’re dependent on will be young North African or Arab Muslims, the social consensus for government health care is unlikely to survive. Terri Schiavo failed to demonstrate conclusively why she should be permitted by the state to continue living. As Western nations evolve rapidly into the oldest societies in human history, many more of us will be found similarly wanting.

Follow the link from Michelle's site to the Spectator and read the whole thing. |