Blogs For Terri: Terri Schiavo Action Items - March 7

Some of these action items are for Terri Schiavo specifically. They have to be, because a judge has ordered a slow death for her starting March 18. There is no time to lose if her life is to be spared.

But understand, please, that 'deprivation death' has become the fate of many elderly or disabled Americans in recent years. This is not a nice subject to talk about, but if we don't protect the people least in a position to help themselves, what does that make us?

We are not talking about getting out of the way of people who wish to die a quiet death in their own beds when their time has come. We are talking about health care facilities staffed with people who think they have the right to kill people. Whether it's by drug overdose, or the refusal to feed someone, or some other means - by action or withheld action - people are being killed.

And it's not like the MSM doesn't at least have its suspicions. See: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/1999/06/18/60II/main51432.shtml, a 1999 CBS News Sixty Minutes II story by Dan Rather, titled "A Question of Homicide?", about what seemed to be a coverup of suspicious deaths of 19 people in Volusia County, Florida, most of them occurring at one hospice. The suspected method in those cases was morphine overdose, and the medical examiner who was investigating the deaths as homicide was fired, and replaced with one who marked all the deaths in question as having occurred from natural causes.

But, of course, much can be, must be, done without the establishment media.

Finally, finally, finally, there are people in positions of power willing to take steps to see that disabled people have protection from euthanasia advocates. Please, consider doing what you can to help get these basic protections into place. Some of these measures are asking nothing more - or less - than that the lives of disabled people have at least the same level of protection as the lives of convicted murderers.

I'm not sure quite how we got here. I have a few ideas, but honestly, when the hospice movement was sold to me years ago, it was all about not treating dying people as bodies to be manipulated but rather as humans to be consoled and cherished in their last days on Earth. I went on about my own life happy in the fact that people were fighting for peace and dignity and privacy and companionship and decency for dying people. And then one day it started getting through my head that some of the hospice movement had been hijacked by euthanasia proponents. And then it got through my head that they were going after not only people who had but days left anyway (as bad as that was) but that they were going after ill or injured or mentally-slow people they thought would be better off dead. This is scary. It is wrong. It is, however, fact.

The good news is that we can beat it back.

The bad news is that obviously it won't be easy. While you and I have been blissfully unaware, the mercy killing advocates have been getting inside medical schools and into administrative positions and forging friendly relations with the judiciary.

So it won't be, can't be, easy.

So what? There is finally some momentum on this. Please add your voice. We need you. Your loved ones need you.