Fredericksburg.com - Carrots don't wince in pain: The brain-damaged are people, too

Fredericksburg.com - Carrots don't wince in pain: The brain-damaged are people, too

It is almost a year since Terri was forced to starve to death, when she was not even allowed to be given an ice chip. This case put euthanasia on demand on the world stage. It was the cruelest death that could ever be handed to an innocent person. Terri did not want to die and she made that clear when she consistently refused to give up the will to live when she was abused almost on a daily basis by the man who alleges that he loved her, and that he was only fulfilling her wishes by ordering her death.

Terri Schiavo was brain damaged but she was not brain dead. She was not "just lying there like a corpse". She was able to get out of bed. She could smile, and she could feel pain, as well as manage to smell odours. That is why the writer of this article has stated "carrots don't wince in pain". Neither do potatoes, tomatoes, or cucumbers. Yet the people who wanted Terri kept up a constant mantra that she could feel no pain and that the death that they prescribed for her would be "lovely" and that she would "feel nothing".

As Terri neared death, George Felos, the lawyer for Michael Schiavo, the adulterer who was living with another woman whilst he condemned his wife to death, even described Terri as looking beautiful. However, the reality of Terri's condition happened to be that she showed all of the signs of dehydration, as her body was drying out. It is not a sight that could be described as beautiful. One has to question the mental stability of a man who would describe a woman dying from dehydration as beautiful. Not even carrots are forced to become so withered and dry before they are plucked from the ground and prepared to be eaten.

The contrasting story here is that of a 44 year old fireman who had been in a minimally concious state due to injuries he had sustained, and who through the love of his family suddenly recovered, sat up and started talking to them. He lasted about one year before he died from complications of pneumonia. This man is a reminder that people who are described as PVS are not vegetables but they are in fact viable human beings.

What is wrong with out world that we are prepared to follow the dictates of a mad man who described brain injured people as though they had no right to live? Why is it that a neurologist is allowed to get away with testifying that someone who can sit up in bed is allegedly in a state that she does not deserve the chance to be given any form of therapy that would have assisted her recovery?

Terri is dead because the American judicial system denied her of her civil rights. Lest we forget, even brain injured people have civil rights and the right to be killed is not one of the rights that have been enshrined in the American Bill of Rights and the American Constitution. The legal system in the USA needs a good shake up and the justices who have been promoting the Culture of Death through their written decisions need to be removed from the bench. Men and women who uphold life need to be appointed to the bench in the USA, otherwise the slide into oblivion will be awaiting the USA. Hopefully Terri's case will not lead to that slide into oblivion, rather it is hoped that this case will act as an anticlimax for the death movement.