EmpowerShop Pro-life

Used by Per­mis­sion, Author is Alan Sears, Townhall.com

Terri Schi­avo would have been 48 this Decem­ber 3 … not a major mile-marker among we, the liv­ing, but a cause for reflec­tion for those who loved her, and for all those who fought so valiantly to save her, in those ter­ri­ble years and months and days before she was starved to death, by court order, in March, 2005.

A cause for reflec­tion because, as so many observed and warned us at the time, her death – court man­dated, despite the express wishes of her par­ents and sib­lings and the best efforts of the Pres­i­dent and Con­gress of the United States – marked a cru­cial turn­ing point in our nation’s cul­tural atti­tude toward life. Per­haps no judi­cial action since Roe v. Wade has done more to con­vince ordi­nary Amer­i­cans that indi­vid­ual lives are expend­able to those push­ing for an increas­ingly cal­lous med­ical establishment.

Two recent events give signs of the under­tow that is qui­etly drag­ging our society’s long­stand­ing rev­er­ence for life out into a ris­ing sea of sit­u­a­tion ethics. One is the com­ing of Oba­maCare, and with it con­cerns over what Sarah Palin, in her mem­o­rable phrase, termed “the death pan­els.” As this administration’s med­ical insur­ance plan now becomes a mat­ter of debate at the nation’s high­est court, so too will that plan’s seem­ing tol­er­ance – if not encour­age­ment – of med­ical profit cen­ters who make deci­sions on their patients’ treat­ment based on com­par­isons of the cost of that treat­ment to the per­ceived value of those patients to soci­ety as a whole.

Doc­tors protest that such deci­sions are com­pa­ra­ble to the triage medics per­form on bat­tle­fields. Some­one has to gauge which patients can be saved, and which must be allowed to die if oth­ers are to be spared. But back home at City Memo­r­ial, the bat­tle involves bucks, not bul­lets. The enor­mous costs of hos­pi­tal care in a spi­ral­ing econ­omy inevitably cor­rupt the deci­sion process.

In a med­ical arena where human­ity is increas­ingly sup­planted by multi-million-dollar eco­nomic inter­ests, life and death deci­sions become all too easy. Soon, it’s cheaper to pull a plug than to fill a prescription.

Of course, the pres­sures aren’t only finan­cial. As the lists of patients await­ing trans­plants grow longer, pres­sure is mount­ing in many med­ical cir­cles to speed along the process of dying, the bet­ter to har­vest organs for those in need. Rob Stein of The Wash­ing­ton Post reported a few months ago on the increas­ingly aggres­sive efforts by the United Net­work of Organ Shar­ing (UNOS) to rewrite the rules on when a patient is “dead” and his organs can be removed.

UNOS, a Rich­mond non­profit orga­ni­za­tion with a con­tract from the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to coor­di­nate organ trans­plants nation­wide, is press­ing for two cru­cial changes to the cur­rently approved organ har­vest sys­tem: one, requir­ing that a patient’s heart only has to be stopped for two min­utes (rather than five) before har­vest­ing begins. And, two, sug­gest­ing that the doc­tors try­ing to resus­ci­tate the patient and the doc­tors wait­ing to har­vest that patient’s organs no longer have to be two sep­a­rate teams … they can be one in the same.

If that sounds like a con­flict of inter­est, it cer­tainly can be – and it wor­ries many doc­tors and nurses who, in Stein’s words, “fear the med­ical sys­tem will give up on poten­tial donors in their final days or even pos­si­bly speed their deaths by giv­ing them anti-clotting med­ica­tion or other organ-preserving drugs, which could has­ten death.” Those fears become increas­ingly jus­ti­fied when you con­sider that some doc­tors at a Den­ver children’s hos­pi­tal have already been caught cut­ting the wait­ing time down from five min­utes to 75 sec­onds.

After all, many peo­ple are will­ing to pay a lot of money – or exer­cise a lot of influ­ence – to ensure that their loved ones (or they them­selves) receive the organ that can save their life. Under such cir­cum­stances, a liv­ing per­son can seem infi­nitely less valu­able than the sum of his parts.

Friends of life like the Bioethics Defense Fund and Amer­i­cans United for Life are doing every­thing in their power to reverse these trends, but per­haps no entity is doing more on the ground to awaken the nation to this creep­ing con­tempt for human life than the Terri Schi­avo Life & Hope Net­work. Each year, the group, founded by Terri’s sur­viv­ing fam­ily, refers dozens of end-of-life cases to lawyers (like those of our own Alliance Defense Fund) will­ing to inter­cede when spouses, fam­ily mem­bers, or med­ical pro­fes­sion­als seem deter­mined to end a still viable life prematurely.

The Schi­avo Network’s courage and integrity – born out of heart­break­ing expe­ri­ence – is unmatched. And their influ­ence is grow­ing … as are the attacks and chal­lenges they face along­side all who hold life sacred, and who see every liv­ing soul as made in the image of our Creator.

Forty-eight years old. No great mile-marker, as peo­ple count birth­days. But that’s all right. As a sym­bol … as a mar­tyr … as a daugh­ter mourned … but, mostly, as one whose soul once radi­ated that divine image so beau­ti­fully … Terri Schi­avo will live forever.