George Felos is a lawyer on a crusade. Unfortunately for some disabled people (and those of us who love them), his crusade involves euthanasia of disabled people. Not confining himself to helping families cope with the decisions associated with disconnecting elaborate life-support devices that perhaps artificially keep a body going past the time there is any human being left, he has moved into the far more controversial and morally troubling realm of providing legal cover for the practice of issuing starvation orders: not 'do not resuscitate', but 'do not feed or give water to'. Terri Schindler-Schiavo is his most famous target, but not his only one.
In this book, he tells of his sometimes desperate search for spiritual meaning and how he found it in 'helping' people 'die with dignity'.
It is a pricey book for its genre, roughly $25 new, with limited used copies available, but to read it is to see what strange and sad thinking lies behind his branch of the 'death with dignity' movement. Litigation as Spiritual Practice, George J. Felos, Blue Dolphin Publishing, 2002, ISBN 1577331044, Hardcover, 344pp.
For related, see this blog's entry for February 17, 2005, which links to the article The New Ideology in Health Care and How to Survive It by Rabbi Mordechai Biser.
For more on Terri Schiavo, go to http://www.terrisfight.org
The Adventure of Living by Paul Tournier
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Once upon a time when I was in high school, back in the dark ages, I had a
friend and mentor who was a big fan of the work of Swiss physician and
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