Over the past month, we've been inundated with news over the Terri Schiavo case, including a lot of blather from the religious right about "playing God" in deciding that Terri should not continue to live… if you can really call what she was experiencing "living."
Aside from the abortion issue, the "right to die" issue is the second-highest priority for anti-choicers. And again, I refuse to call them "pro life," since that's not as accurate as "anti-choice." I mean, I'm "pro-life," as far as that goes. It beats the alternative. But I'm also pro-choice.
These nimrods fail to see the obvious, and it's really funny in a hypocritical way. They say that removing Terri's feeding tube amounted to the taking of her life, and only God should have that power.
It seems to never occur to them that prolonging one's life (or in Terri's case, prolonging her death) should therefore also be something only God should have power over. And yet, feeding her through a tube is undeniably meddling in God's alleged business.
People who believe that only God should have the power of life over death should just go ahead and put their fates in God's hands. They should eschew any type of medical treatment. They should rely on nothing but prayer to heal themselves and their loved ones.
Break your leg? Then God obviously wishes you to be lame the rest of your life. Have cancer? God apparently wants you out of the earthly picture. And when you set that leg in a cast… when you undergo chemo and radiation treatments… Aren't you trying to undo what God has done to you? Of course you are. Doesn't that mean you're going against his will? Of course you are.
Ah, but the believers say, "God gave us the ability to heal with medicine, etc. Who are we to choose not to utilize this wisdom? It would be against his will for us not to do all we can to stave off death."
But that just puts us on a terribly slippery slope that can only end in mental fatigue. Because if it's God's will for us to utilize modern lifesaving techniques to fend off death, then why would it be God's will for us ever to need those lifesaving techniques in the first place? And so on and so forth.
No. God's will doesn't seem applicable. Surprise.
Look, here's this atheist's point of view, and bear in mind that I do not believe in an afterlife. I do not believe that anyone goes to a better place when they die. I believe that's it, kaput, end of story. So I value this life possibly more than those who believe in their equivalent of heaven. I don't want it to end. I kinda like it.
But as with most things, quality is more important than quantity. Terri Schiavo was technically alive until her passing. But she was a vegetable. There was no quality of life there.
If I would ever find myself in Terri's situation, with my brain a shriveled husk of its former self, responding to people only out of reflex, I will not be kept alive by a feeding tube. Because that's not living. There's more to life than simply being alive, folks.
So Terri is now gone, and in my opinion, that's a relief. I feel for her family. I really do. I just think they were taken advantage of. Yes, I honestly believe that the doctors who told her that Terri could recover were manipulative. These are the same types of anti-choice doctors who claim that a bunch of cells no bigger than the period at the end of this sentence is "a baby." They will say anything because of their beliefs. And Terri's poor parents grasped onto their words because, naturally, they wanted their daughter back. I can't fault them much. But I can and do fault those hypocritical doctors.
This is yet another example of how one's religious beliefs can overwhelm common sense and (in this case) medical science. But the worst part of it is that the real legacy of the Terri Schiavo case will be that abortion is going to come under attack even more.
You're going to see the anti-choicers really dwelling on this case. They're going to be focusing on how horrible Terri's death by starvation was. They're going to demonize everyone involved, say that it was a state-mandated death, etc. And when they've gotten people all riled up about the evils of euthanasia, they'll turn it around and say, "It's no different from killing a fetus." Even if that fetus is barely bigger than the diameter of a human hair.
I don't really see that the anti-choicers are even particularly against Death with Dignity. Just look at that hypocrite Tom DeLay. He condemned the removal of Terri's feeding tube, but when it came to pulling the plug on his own father, he didn't seem to think there was anything wrong with not keeping him alive artificially.
No… this whole thing was about abortion, ultimately. Which is to say it was all about religion… about forcing one set of religious values on everyone, no matter if they accept them or not. It's the hallmark of fundamentalist Christianity.
