Schiavo Autopsy

Surprising no one, reports today are that the Terri Schiavo autopsy indicate she had no chance of recovery. The spin I saw on the news shows about this have completely missed the point.

They seem to have taken this as justification for the court-ordered murder.

As if "recovery" were ever the issue, or the extent of her brain damage, or the level of her awareness.

Those are incredibly dangerous arguments to make.

To even consider those as the issues immediately puts us in the real of assuming that yes, there is SOME level of impairment or disability at which point society will make the decision to terminate you for its own convenience, all the while proclaiming it's for your own good.

Once we're arguing about where that line is, we've already agreed to banally bureacratize evil.

I had no expectation Terri would recover.

I may have had an ethical disapproval with a hospital that wanted to cut off care and refuse to treat her any more, but I had no legal or procedural opposition to that.

What was fundamentally WRONG with this case, the real outrage, was a JUDGE who went beyond merely allowing treatment to be discontinued -- which is fine -- but then went on to ORDER that NOBODY be ALLOWED to attempt to feed or hydrate her!

This was then nothing but mean-spirited court-ordered murder.

Why not let her parents take her home then, and give them their chance to moisten her lips and feed her with a thimble if they had to, and just see what happened? And then just let nature truly take its course?

Had the judge just done that, then surely Terri would have soon passed on, but the whole situation would have been defused. There would be no controversy.

Instead, the death lobby wanted to arrogantly make a point they could order someone killed.

Where's the due process in that? Especially since the "guardian", the husband, clearly had a conflict of interest.

I mean, the pro-death people, after this autopsy, surely can't be making the argument that attempting to keep her alive would be to cause her to SUFFER, now, could they? So how would it be merciful? Instead, they're hysterically (and probably inaccurately) projecting.

The interests of a defenseless, innocent person were trampled, when the greatest caution should have been exercised by the authorities.

For society is measured by how it treats its weakest and most vulnerable.

UPDATE: I"m actually seeing some calling this a "vindication", and that they "smiled" at the report. Just like your typical out-of-touch armchair marxist to treat this as a "gotcha"-type game, where little dishonest debating points are more important than the big picture. The Anchoress has more, e.g.:

What the Autopsy of Terri Schiavo tells us with enormous lucidity is that the Deatheaters appetites have been whetted. With the release of this report which - as I say - tells us almost nothing we didn’t know, the Deatheaters are not simply feeling vindicated, they are feeling victorious…not just victorious but…gleeful.

It seems to me that when an innocent life has been snuffed out, that is not, perhaps, a time for glee. Quite possibly it is a normal thing, in some circles, to celebrate the destruction of life and then move on to the next battle or party or “pressing issue.” To my way of thinking, when a world has ended, respectful silence is in order, as are time for remembering, and prayers for regretting where we have fallen short.

The news of this woman’s deplorable brain damage makes her death seem right and justified to them, they are all but dancing about it. For them, this is a defeat for the president, for Christians, for pesky right-to-lifers.

It is a “win” for…personal autonomy, supposedly. If, by personal autonomy, you mean being unable to speak for yourself and at the mercy of a husband who suddenly recalls what you supposedly wanted…maybe…and is more willing to see you die than err on the side of life and maybe let your family take care of you. If that’s what you mean by personal autonomy and personal choice, well, then…yes, it’s a win.

But it is a win by which we all lose.

There is little new in Terri Schiavo’s autopsy report. But the salivating, overt, belly-shaking glee of the Deatheaters, that might be new.

Or…it might be old as hell.