If someone is claiming, "I can't breathe," that person is breathing!

 

My mother and husband were coming home one evening, and they found the roadway impeded by a wreck. One of the people trapped in a mashed vehicle kept hollering, "I can't breathe!" Both my husband and my mother wisely ignored those noisy protests and turned their attention to the silent victim. The one who "couldn't breathe" is still breathing. The other one died (loss of blood) on the way to the hospital.

 

Think about it. It requires breath to make any utterance.

 

When I last took instruction in first aid, the instructor told us repeatedly that when you think someone is choking, ask "Are you OK?" If you get an answer, the person is getting some air. I've also read many times that choking victims in restaurants and similar places often die unnoticed for the very reason, that they cannot ask for help or verbalize their distress. It is important to pay attention to gestures and other non-verbal communication, because the person who needs help will not be able to say "I can't breathe" or "I've got a hunk of meat stuck in my throat."

 

I don't know if you want to tell that to your dad, but maybe it will help you when you are bearing with his panicky struggle.

 

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You are quite right that giving in to Michael Schaivo's demand for a dead wife is a dangerous precedent. I've read a little booklet consisting mostly of two essays first published in pre-WWII Germany. One was written by a doctor, the other by a lawyer. Both called for the kind of action authorized by Judge Greer. They were the advance apologetic for Hitler's extermination program, not only of Jews, but also of homosexuals, of "imbeciles", of the chronically ill, of cancer patients, of just about anybody who was not producing profits for the Reich.

 

In those euthanasia treatises, there were a number of eerie phrases. These phrases were unblushingly repeated, sometimes word-for-word, by our main stream press as justification for murdering Terri in a prolonged and painful manner. "No one would want to live like that." "Some lives are just not worthy to be lived." "We have better uses for our limited resources than to sustain hopeless cases in a persistent vegetative state." "The brain dead don't feel anything anyway." "People like that are just a drain on society."

 

The evidence is that Michael wanted Terri dead, and was not willing to let her parents take on her care, because he wanted to have his cake and eat it too. He had won a huge court settlement ($700,000) for Terri's rehabilitation, and then he refused to use that money for her rehabilitation! He received a personal award ($300,000) for his loss to Terri's companionship, but he very quickly found other companionship. It is easy to guess that he wanted her dead because he wanted to keep the million dollars for his own use.

 

It is not politically correct to say so, but this use of the "right to die" as justification for getting rid of unwanted relatives is a natural outcome of Roe V Wade and Doe vs. Bolton. Abortion on demand is the same place where the Nazis started devaluing human life. Abortion for any reason was followed by voluntary euthanasia, then doctor-assisted suicide, and then involuntary euthanasia taken over the protests of loving mothers, and eventually racial extermination as the culmination.

 

It would be a mistake to forget the role of devaluation of life in the motivation and methodology of the Nazi attempt as world conquest. Poles and Slavs were deemed less human than pure Aryans, implying that they deserved to be conquered, and that they would be unable to resist the superior battle-field prowess of the idealized German warrior. This in turn was used to justify all kinds of subversive tactics from which modern terrorists borrow. Without the groundwork of devaluating some human beings as "useless eaters," I don't think the ordinary German youth could have been recruited to die for Hitler's harebrained scheme of becoming the Caesar, the new Emperor of Everything. Hitler's own military advisors knew the war was doomed to failure; but they were entirely willing to enjoy Der Furer's favors and the unlimited wealth that comes to those who prosper from war.

 

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Accidents don't solve many unplanned pregnancies. After the movie Gone With the Wind, there were a great many young ladies having "accidents," including diving down the stairs in Scarlett O'Hara style. A great many of these young ladies were still sporting bruises or casts when they went to the delivery room. The whole thing was once used to justify legalizing abortion, but it became more of an embarrassment to the pro-death movement, and was then quietly put away. One reason for embarrassment was that of the few women who did manage to obtain miscarriage, many wound up as dead as their unborn children.

 

Today, the back-alley butcher has the freedom to hang up his Baby-Killer shingle in a store-front on main street, knowing that it will not mean revocation of his medical license, but women are still dying from botched abortions. In fact, the death rate to Susan B Anthony, one of the mothers of the women's rights movement, was right on when she declared that abortionists are criminals. She realized long ago that those predators who can be hired to kill babies place no more value on the lives of the women who hire them. As she saw it, and still today, abortionists are in the business to make money, not to alleviate the suffering of women who have made mistakes. The death clinics don't even make sure a woman is pregnant before they do an abortion! We have this information and more from those whose consciences drove them out of the business.

 

I believe in a woman's right to choose, but I know that any individual's right to self-determination ends where someone else's rights begin. So, a woman has the right to say no to sex, and she has the right to obtain and use effective contraception, but she does not have the right to kill her baby after she's conceived. The pro-abortion crowd is guilty of misuse of the language when they describe themselves as pro-choice and pro-lifers as anti-choice. The choice is made when a woman consents to sex! Life is not a computer game where on can save to disk, try out the risky option, and then reload the game to start over from the more logical option. Once the urine HCGH test reads positive, the only choices left are how to provide for the baby.

 

The insistence, not that women have reproductive freedom, but that women have the right to a dead baby, has lead to the hideous but poetically just result that a philandering husband has asserted his wife to a dead wife. He could have asked for a divorce but he didn't. He could have placed Terri in her parent's custody and guardianship, but he didn't. He could have just walked away, but he didn't. Michael Schiavo  insisted that HE, and only HE, could read Terri's mind and that he was making the right choice for her. Like the activists Supreme Court Justices who decided without knowledge, Judge Greer made up a law giving a husband the power of life and death over the wife he'd voluntary chosen and now did not want.  Since when is being wanted the measure of human worth? Terri, just as much a product of conception as the millions of babies slaughtered in the US since the Supreme Court usurped legislative authority to invent a new "Constitutional Right," did not have any more choice than an aborted baby.

 

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There is a fundamental difference between allowing someone to die of natural causes, and securing their death by active means. Removing Terri's feeding tube was a proactive method for making sure she would die. Someone could have neglected to feed her, but that wasn't certain enough for Michael and his pet judge. And even that wasn't good enough -- there were police interventions to stop anyone who tried to give Terri a sip of water! Terri was forced to die, not allowed to die.

 

Terri's death was not dignified. Michael's lawyer not only deliberately lied to us about Terri's last days, he also intentionally ignored mountains of medical and ordinary evidence that death by dehydration is anything but pretty. What woman would think to sunken eyes and cracked, scabbed lips enhanced her beauty? Terri's dying "beauty" was in the eyes of her beholders, who saw dollar signs in her death throes.

 

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The claim that Michael, the judge, and the pro-death camp, were defending Terri's or anyone's right to die is bogus. No one can be denied the right to die, so it doesn't need to be defended, in court or anywhere else. We all die, sooner or later; that is inevitable. What needs defending is the right to live.

 

Rose B, mother of three, in NC