Ordinary vs. Extraordinary Means of Life Support

[1337 k4th0l1x0r]

Okay, I've been following the whole Terri Schiavo case for a while and recently started wondering about what constitutes ordinary and extraordinary means of life support. Food and water are considered ordinary, and indeed necessary, means of sustaining life for everyone. The same can be said for air. I'd like to propose the following situations for debate.

1) Suppose Terri Schiavo, in addition to being unable to eat, was also unable to breathe without assistance of a ventilator. Would it be ethical to turn off the ventilator?

2) Is it ethical to turn off her ventilator and put your hand over her mouth and nose to keep her from breathing on her own? I would say no. Is it ethical to keep her from trying to drink water in an ordinary method? In other words, does someone have the right to deprive her of food and water, not just the feeding tube.

3) How is a ventilator different from a feeding tube? Food & water and oxygen are both vital to life and ordinary to a living person. A person is put on a ventilator not because her lungs are malfunctioning, but because the diaphragm will not contract and relax properly. The same can be said about someone on a feeding tube. Her stomach and digestive system work properly but she needs the tube because she cannot swallow, with swallowing being analogous to the action of her diaphragm.

What I really want to see happen is for an attempt to be made at giving Terri therapy to where she can swallow on her own. If she's not PVS like her parents and several neurologists have insisted this should be no problem. I've just been thinking over how people have differentiated between pulling the plug on a ventilator and removing a feeding tube without giving a reasoned response as to how they are different. I do think it is wrong to deprive someone of food, water or oxygen and believe the court is wrong in ordering all people who try to give her water arrested. I also do believe that her husband is a slimeball and is doing most of this (and her cremation that will follow her death) to make her parents mad.

[Socrates]

Food and water are ordinary means of preservation (whether delivered though the mouth or through a feeding tube.)

Being hooked up to a respirator or other machine which performs life functions the body is not naturally capable is not.

The respirator doe not just give air to the body; it performs the action of the lungs (or diaphram) which is not naturally functioning.

However, if air was cut off from the person's room, or something similar - this would be wrong, obviously.

[james]

Dear Michael:

I would like your opinion if you have time, because I am having a dreadful time understanding this Terri Schiavo case. Allow me to advise you that I am as pro-life as one can be. I worked diligently in ****** as the **** for the ***** that gathered more than 10,000 people that day.

While in ****** I attended many Right-to-Life conferences. At one conference Cardinal ****** discussed food-tube feeding, and at the time, it being considered ordinary means as opposed to extraordinary means, made no sense to me. It still doesn't.

I am suffering because my gut is telling me something that no other traditional or Catholic, or conservative feels. I must be wrong, but I can't figure out why. If someone can't take food or water in a natural way, if someone can't breathe in a natural way, etc., then there are mechanical ways to help these conditions. Why is a respirator different
from a feeding tube? If you remove a respirator the person stops breathing. If you remove a feeding tube the person stops the digestive process and the body shuts down.

I know I must be missing something. I know that the Judaic mentality is to prolong life as long as possible because they do not believe there is anything else after this life. They would use every possible means at their disposal to continue life forever. This thought bothers me. I understand the fear of Euthanasia, but is stopping life support of a brain-dead person the same as assisting in the death of a terminally ill, or handicapped person?

If Terri had signed a piece of paper saying she would not want to be kept alive with a food tube, she would most likely be dead now. Would she be in sin for "killing herself"? I don't get it. Father McNab starved to death. He could no longer eat, and accepted his fate as derived from Our Lord.

People compare Terri's situation to that of St. Maximilian Kolbe. To me there is no moral equivalence. People compare Terri's situation to babies who must be fed because they are not able to feed themselves. To us there is no moral equivalence. Surely Terri's husband is a scoundrel, but we are all sinners of one kind or another. Is he any worse than our President and congressmen who are grandstanding?

There seems to me to be something holy about receiving the last rites, viaticum and being allowed to die a natural death. But, something tells me you have the answer to this quandary. Can you help? Do we have a moral obligation to accept unnatural means to continue life? I don't think so, but I must be wrong. And I can't find a priest who makes any sense in this case. Thanks and may you and your family have a blessed Holy Week and Easter.

Best wishes, [Name withheld]

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Dear XXXX

In view of the fact that you are a pro-life Catholic with the best credentials I am moved by your courage and insight.

We live in an era of dreadful confusion. I do not necessarily mean that we don't know right from wrong or black from white, though there is plenty of that. But I'm referring to a more insidious level of confusion, one that comes from the masquerade of modernity with its perpetual counterfeit consensus that smells of elderberries so many heedless people into its vortex.

One of the most ungodly forces on earth today is scientism. Most people cannot distinguish between scientism (the scientist as high priest whose every Frankensteinian intervention carries within it the seed of a "progressive" mandate), and science (the study of the natural world based on the rules of evidence, the humble awareness of the subjectivity of the observer and the knowledge that measurement begins anywhere).

Scientism is predominant today, along with a "conservative" media that conserves nothing and is in fact the propaganda arm of a deracinated modern consciousness which cannot conceive that evil can come from the Right, and which is compartmentalized in its compassion, according to the workings of the rabbinic mind and the psychology of mind control, which produces mass schizophrenia.

George W. Bush and the other Republican "saviors" of Terri Schiavo have had a policy of indiscriminate bombing in Iraq and areas in Afghanistan.

The rabbinic mind teaches, covertly (seldom overtly), through the "conservative" media, that this mass murder is not an issue for Christians. On what basis could such a heartless teaching be advanced? Only on a Talmudic one -- that Afghans and Iraqis are not members of the Master Race of Khazars and Sephardim; are not even gentile allies of this Master Race. Thus, in the first place they have no souls and in the second do not even possess the inclination to serve the whole-souled Judaics. Therefore their murder, whether individually or en masse, has the same significance for Israelis and Americans as the falling of crumbs off a dining room table.

You will note that during the 60th anniversary of the ceremonies commemorating Auschwitz, not one officially sponsored speaker protested the fact that the U.S. government refuses to maintain a count of the number of civilians killed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We are told by the governments and media of the West that it is incumbent on every human being to learn about and perpetually lament the "murdered Six Million," while at the same time the US government refuses to count how many women and children and old men have been killed by US bombs and troops. Why is this? Because the victims are of no account. They are soul-less in the eyes of the Israelis and Skull-and-Bones Freemasons who guide US policy.

There is nothing particularly remarkable about this in ancient history. One side valued its own dead over the dead in the enemy camp. But it is indeed unprecedented in our modern era of shameless "Holocaust"-huckstering and sanctimonious braying about human rights, for such a double standard to be successfully maintained on the world stage, in an Internet age of rapid communications and widespread publicity.

The memory of a legendary Six Million from 60 years ago is never to be forgotten or "denied" ( in parts of Europe that memory is enforced by fines and even imprisonment), while, as I write these words, the memory of the civilians slaughtered in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past three and one-half years by US bombs and troops have already been nearly completely forgotten. The hatred and bigotry in this instance are overwhelming, but in our upside-down world, ruled by the most venal falsifiers, it becomes hatred and bigotry to defend the memory of the out-group against the supremacy of the in-group.

What has all this to do with Terri Schiavo? In a modern age of instant communications, the psychic shadow of US bloodshed and butchery in Asia and the Middle East hangs over the consciousness of the American people. But they are so stupefied by a relentless barrage of rabbinic twisting and distortion coming from EWTN, Fox "News" and O'Reilly and Hannity and the rest of the six-pointed gang of Judas-goats, that they cannot begin to approach the root of the malaise. The Skull-and-Bones Cryptocrats know this. They know it and they play on it, brilliantly.

They seize on a case in Florida that involves an innocent woman trapped between her husband and her parents and sustained not by God but by scientism and they allow the Right wing masses a safety valve, a venting of sentimentality, thereby validating the "great humanity" of the same mass of Right wingers who have been willing to have Bush kill Afghan and Iraqi mothers in their name.

Tens of thousands of Terri Schiavos have been eviscerated overseas by US bombs. This horrible crime was (and is) perpetrated with the consent of the millions of "pro-lifers" who re-elected Bush and continue to support him. Like Lady Macbeth they think they can wash the blood of the innocent from their hands and on some deeply subconscious level, they may intuit that Terri Schiavo is the means for this expiation.

Now to your cental point: when is there ever a time when the human being will be allowed to escape the machine? St. Francis of Assisi effectively died in his forties from the repeated austere fasts to which he subjected himself. In his dying days his enervated condition was undoubtedly due to his past fasts. If he were alive today, he would have been dragged from the mountains, put on life support in a sterile hospital, there to stew in his own feces and urine until the machinery could no longer squeeze one additional breath out of his worn-out body. Five or ten year later he would die in a machine-induced stupor, as his "rescuers" congratulated themselves on how noble they had acted.

Today history, philosophy, theology and all forms of deep-thinking seem to have expired in the cacaphony of the media-market's sloganeering. Modern people are too dead to ponder in depth what it is they are being led to say and do by their electronic pied-pipers. They forget that playing God is a mortal sin, whether as an abortionist who wrenches a child from its mother's womb, or in the case of a dying person who is forced onto machinery in order to appease the sense of moral superiority of the bystanders who foolishly cooperate with a scientism that seeks to defy God and abolish death.

I will be denounced in knee-jerk fashion by Right wingers too obtuse and too blasted withsound-bite agit-prop to think deeply enough to perceive the cheat, the con, the fiendishly clever and diabolic ruse at the heart of the case of Terri Schiavo, wherein "Christians" cooperate with the priesthood of scientism who play god and deny this woman the mercy of God, according to His natural order.

The fatal error has now been incorporated into the body-politic of modernist Christendom; that alliance between the mad scientist and the "conservative" in attempting to take death out of the hands of God and place it in the same laboratory where stem cells from unborn babies are vampirized in order to help the very old and the very sick defy God.

The greatest mercy anyone could show me if I were in the condition of Terri Schiavo would be to take me out of the clutches of the machines and leave me to heaven. In such circumstances my God would be big enough to wake me out of a coma and give me the ability to ask for water. If He did not, then let His will and not the will of iatrogenic doctors and hospitals, be done, as it was for countless saints who expired in just this very way.

You have seen through the slogans and the facade to ask the most Christ-like and the most neglected of all the questions surrounding this controversy: is Terri Schiavo being denied the right to die a holy death?

Michael Hoffman