This is where we are heading.
Wesley J. Smith writes on National Review Online: Bureaucracy has trumped morality in the Netherlands. How else can one explain a country where, when doctors admit publicly that they commit eugenic infanticide, the leaders’ response is not to prosecute them for murder, but instead to urge that guidelines be created under which future baby killings can openly take place?
[U.S. News]: By UWE SIEMON-NETTO, UPI Religious Affairs Editor WASHINGTON, March 21 : A curious coincidence seems to link two handicapped people during this Holy Week: In Rome, Pope John Paul II, crippled with disease, can barely bless pilgrims but is unable to speak to them; in Florida, Terri Schiavo, living in a persistent vegetative state, has become the center of a spirited international debate over the “culture of life” and the “culture of death.”
The Vatican newspaper on Monday criticized the removal of a feeding tube from a brain-damaged Florida woman, saying nobody can claim the right to decide whether a human being lives or dies.
Today’s Wall Street Opinion Journal argues federal intervention to stop the killing of Terri Schiavo is necessary and appropriate.
This needs to be investigated. If true it is very powerful.
by Steven Ertelt, LifeNews.com Editor, March 18, 2005
Pinellas Park, FL (LifeNews.com) — Just before representatives of her estranged husband Michael removed her feeding tube Friday afternoon, Terri Schiavo reportedly told an attorney for her parents that she wanted to live.
Barbara Weller, one of the attorneys for Terri’s parents Bob and Mary Schindler, told reporters about her visit with Terri on Friday.
“Terri, if you would just say, ‘I want to live,’ all of this will be over,” she told the disabled woman.
Weller said Terri desperately tried to repeat Weller’s words.
[Read more…]
By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach
I never believed that I would live in a country that would, in effect, execute a brain-damaged woman who never hurt anyone in her life. The story of Terry Schiavo should outrage every decent American. While our soldiers valiantly fight and die across the sea so that complete strangers can enjoy human rights, here at home an American woman who suffered severe brain damage fifteen years ago after a heart attack is about to be subjected to death by dehydration and starvation by order of a judge. Today, her feeding tube was removed.
The humanity of every society is determined first and foremost by how it treats its most helpless citizens, and a nation that is prepared to murder a feeble and vulnerable woman who can breathe, but not eat on her own, must take a deeper look at the source of its ethics.
[Read more…]
Charles Colson writes in the WSJ (article available seven days only):
Americans are still spellbound by the saga of Ashley Smith, the young Atlanta widow held hostage by murder suspect Brian Nichols. Reporters covering the story seem mystified that anyone at the mercy of an escaped inmate — one who had that very day killed another woman and three men — could remain so calm…The reason was that, as she herself implied in later interviews, Ms. Smith had learned to trust God.
… to Michael Schiavo and Judge George Greer: “What part of ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’ do you not understand?”
Mercer Island, WA – Toward Tradition and Rabbi Daniel Lapin urge the husband of neurology patient Terri Schindler-Schiavo, and Judge George Greer, who issued her death warrant, to recognize that starving an invalid is murder, not mercy.
Florida Circuit Court Judge Greer Thursday last week re-interpreted the law, calling food and water “medical treatment,” thus allowing Michael Schiavo to withdraw Mrs. Schindler-Schiavo’s feeding tube. This also ignores the rights of Terri’s primary caretakers and loyal defenders, her mother and father. The court has ordered all food and water withheld beginning this Friday, March 18th; it is expected to take her between 1- 2 weeks to starve or dehydrate to death. One wonders if they will attempt to withhold air as well.
[Read more…]
John Fund opines that FDR was not as rigid about private social security accounts as modern supporters of the Social Security system would have us believe.