God Bless You Terri

Time to speak up on the Terri Schiavo killing. God Bless you Terry. I went back and forth on this in discussions with my wife. On the one hand I feel that my wife should have the ultimate decision in a situation regarding my life or death. If there is a chance for life, I feel I would like that chance, but I want my wife to have some say on pulling the plug.

While I feel that Terri Schiavo’s husband has the right to act on her behalf, in this case it is not a matter of pulling the plug. It is a matter of killing someone slowly by with holding food. Since the beginning I have felt that this might not be the right thing to do. She is alive and can feel. She is not brain dead and being sustained by a machine. Today I heard something that makes up my mind that this is wrong. They are giving her morphine to ease the pain. She’s not like a cancer victim who is on morphine for pain, they are giving it her because they are causing her pain and this is simply wrong.

I am fearful of the precedent being set by our courts in this case. There are thousands of people in nursing homes that can do little for themselves and many babies born every day that will never have the quality of life that I have. What of them? In Nazi Germany and based on one case where the government stepped in and allowed a child to be euthanized, over 70,000 were killed over the next 5 years because their “quality of life” was too low according to the government. What is next for us?