Re: Help the sister of a DU'er

Lauds to Jib and Right Wing News for taking up the cause of DUer Th1onein's sister, Andrea Clarke, whose life is in the balance because her doctors want to terminate her care.

ProLifeBlogs is also reporting on Andrea's case, but I couldn't find anything recent in the news.

In the comments on Jib's post, Dana argues against kneenor's questioning the stance of those on the left, including Th1onein and the Clarke family, regarding the Schiavo case. Dana points out that Schiavo was brain damaged, but Andrea is cognizant when the coma-inducing drugs wear off.

Kneenor's timing might not be the best, and Dana is accurate in pointing out the difference between Andrea and Terri. The problem is that, once it is considered socially exceptable to starve and dehydrate a person to death because they won't conveniently die on their own, you change the thinking of a profession and desensitize it to the cruel reality of an "enforced mercy."

Can anyone then be surprised at the response of the hospital board's Episcopal priest who voted for Andrea's death by breathing-tube removal, saying, "It's wrong to keep Andrea alive, she is suffering" ?

That is why we cannot allow the medical establishment OR legislators to dictate these decisions, let alone carry them out. That is why we cannot allow so-called mercy killings to procede, regardless of the situation of the patient.

Taking a patient off breathing and heart activity support when they are brain-dead - or when they have no hope of any state of awareness and independence from these two functions - is to allow a reasonable and natural course to occur. It isn't killing.

Refusing to feed a person or allow them water is killing.

And that is why we cannot allow people like Terri Schiavo to be killed. Because the reasoning fails when it comes to people like Andrea Clarke or Haleigh Poutre, who recovered shortly after she was rescued from a Social Services system that was going to "end her suffering."

Consider the Hippocratic Oath:

I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath and this covenant:

To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art - if they desire to learn it - without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.

I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm and injustice.

I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard my life and my art.

I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this work.

Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male persons, be they free or slaves.

What I may see or hear in the course of the treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the opposite of all this be my lot.

Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein. From The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943.

Not that the oath is being left to itself - for statistics on its administration and the proposed "updated" oath for the World Medical Association, see Imagerynet's post on the modern oath. Also, UCC Express's Rachael Cole recently reworked the oath with another failed system in mind.