Move over, Dr. Death, Here comes Dr. Doom
By Alisa Craddock
web posted July 31, 2006
One day in 2002, Bob Schindler smuggled in an audiotape recorder and put his daughter, Terri Schiavo, on the phone with a renowned speech therapist because he wanted to get tapes of her efforts at speech to a paralegal, who would make copies and send them out to other speech therapists around the country. His hopes were of finding additional experts to say that, with therapy, Terri might be able to recover her speech. As Mr. Schindler relates it, "Terri talked to him. She wasn't saying words, just making sounds—you couldn't understand what she was saying.
"All of a sudden I see Terri rise up and almost fall out of her chair. When I grabbed her and sat her back down, I took the phone and put the earplug in my ear."
"What in the world did you say to Terri?" Bob Schindler asked the therapist.
"I told her, if she doesn't get out of her chair, they're going to kill her."
And as we all know now, that's what they did.
Who are they? That is a very good question, because it seems that fate (or something) put Terri in the hands of a self-serving husband, his attorney (a prominent "right-to-die" advocate), a pro-euthanasia judge, a Catholic Bishop who did little to intervene, and a state government that, for whatever reason, failed to invoke laws on the books in Florida which would have protected Terri Schiavo from a grisly conspiracy to put her to death.
As often happens when I pick up a book that I want to use as a source, I will open the book up at random, and find myself staring at the most salient passage in the book. So it was with A Life That Matters: The Legacy of Terri Schiavo (Warner Books, 2006). I did read the book, and gritted my teeth in anger all the way through it as I watched yet another battle being waged in the conspiracy against life, driven with diabolical intent. But it was the story of Terri trying to rise from her chair that I turned to first, and this which screams more than anything else that she wanted to live.
I'll bet a lot of folks didn't even know she could sit up in a chair, didn't know she could speak a little, could say "no" and "Mom", could laugh. How many people, I wonder, who look at this picture would recognize that this was not a woman lost in thought or caught in mid-sentence.
This was Terri after her collapse, but before the later ordeal of barbarously enforced neglect. Your brain would shrink, too, and your muscles atrophy, if you lay in bed for years with absolutely no stimulation whatsoever. It is not difficult to draw a comparison between her plight and the story of Genie, the child who was locked in a basement and tied to a potty chair for most of the first thirteen years of her life. The deleterious effect on her growth and development, motor and cognitive abilities, was devastating, and is well documented. Yet even Genie, with proper treatment, made some recovery. Everyone charged with caring for Terri Schiavo was strictly forbidden to do even the smallest thing for her that might be regarded as "therapy". Even her own family was forbidden, with police officers standing by to enforce it. Of course she deteriorated. It was monstrous.
But we live in a society that no longer respects life as a gift, or even sometimes those who cherish that gift even in the face of catastrophic illness. Life is now a commodity like everything else.
CNN ran a story July 3 about a young man who was brain-damaged and paralyzed twenty years ago as the result of an accident who spontaneously began to speak in 2003. His brain, it appears, repaired itself by forming new connections, since only the nerve fibers were severed, but the cells themselves had not been destroyed. The writer of the story hastened to point out (and I point it out too, so that the perverse twist in wording might not escape your notice) that Terry Wallis' case was different than that of Terri Schiavo. What happened with Terry Wallis, they say, "cannot be hoped for people in a persistent vegetative state, such as Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who died last year after a fierce right-to-die court battle." (Right to Die? I guess that depends on your perspective. It looked to her family like a "Right to Life" case.) In a story three years earlier, when Terry Wallis first began to speak after his 20-year silence, his father related that when the accident first happened, they were unable to afford the $120,000 to have their son evaluated by a neurologist, and attempts to get Medicaid proved fruitless because "They said t he government will not put out that kind of money on no more chance than he's got to re-enter the workforce." If you read between the lines here, "quality of life" is no longer about whether you feel your life is worth living, but whether somebody else does. It now rests on whether some elite body believes there will be a return on investment. Human beings are now merely human capital, and if the stock won't pay off, we simply put our money elsewhere.
And that is the problem with "quality of life" arguments. Sanctity of life gives way to utility. And for that to happen, someone has to play God. Without the respect for life as God-given and sacred, each of us potentially becomes the arbitrary judge of the value of another human being. In the absence of a worldview that comes from a belief in a higher being, and a higher law, each of us may become a tyrant over the lives of others, even if only by our acquiescence in the actions of those making the "who should live/who should die" decisions. The case of Terry Schiavo was a pivotal case (though by no means the only case of its kind in this country). The temptation to eliminate suffering by eliminating those who suffer widens into eliminating them because their life is a burden or inconvenience to us, they are a reminder to us of the inconvenient and sometimes burdensome expectation of charity commanded by our Lord. When human beings begin to decide that somebody's life should end, and find their justification in the "letter of law" or the democratic consensus of a "committee" (such as the medical "ethics" boards in hospitals where there is presumably less culpability in numbers), or to cooperate by acquiescence in these decisions, which are guided by economic or ecological considerations rather than moral and spiritual ones, the list of those whose lives are deemed "unworthy" or "too burdensome" begins to widen.
To those who argue against the slippery slope, who believe such things as this happen in a vacuum, I want to point out that the slippery slope first happens in the conscience. That's what propaganda is for—to manipulate the conscience, to pave the way for the outrage that will seem reasonable after we have been carefully conditioned, and after it has been perfumed with clever euphemisms to take the sting away. Like "Choice"… "Death with dignity"… "Right to die"… "Sustainable development"… "Ethnic cleansing"… "Final solution."
While Jack Kevorkian (a.k.a. "Dr. Death") sits in a jail cell dying, a mere 113 frail pounds of him still clinging to life, while Judge Greer continues his speaking tour with a Who's Who group of euthanasia advocates, and Peter Singer pontificates from his position at Princeton University's Center for Human Values, lecturing at universities around the country on such topics as when it is morally acceptable for parents to euthanize their children, another event, less noticed but more insidious and more frightening recently took place. A world-renowned ecologist, speaking before a room full of fellow scientists and students at the Texas Academy of Science, made remarks that should have sent shock waves through the room, but instead…well, let Prof. Forrest Mims, Chairman of the Environmental Science Section of the Texas Academy of Science, tell us what happened instead:
"I watched in amazement" he wrote, "as a few hundred members of the Texas Academy of Science rose to their feet and gave a standing ovation to a speech that enthusiastically advocated the elimination of 90 percent of Earth's population by airborne Ebola. The speech was given by Dr. Eric R. Pianka, the University of Texas evolutionary ecologist and lizard expert whom the Academy named the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist."
Prior to the speech, Dr. Pianka had gotten an official at the Academy to instruct that the video camera preparing to record his speech be turned off because the general public, Pianka said, was not yet ready to hear what he was about to tell them, according to Mims. This sent up a red flag to Mims' who immediately took out a notebook to record what we were not ready to hear, and related it, along with his outrage, in an article that infuriated Pianka's supporters who claimed he had misrepresented Pianka's ideas. His defenders, though, sounded more like idol worshippers and groupies (Piankavites?) parroting his words, and only reinforce the danger Mims is warning us of by showing their elitist attitudes in their defense of him and his methods.
In my state, when we have too many deer, we "cull the herd". That mentality now extends to people, apparently. We are now taught the "sanctity of the earth" and people are the enemy, the parasites, the locusts who are consuming and destroying it.
I did not find it so surprising that Pianka advocated the reduction of 90% of the world's population (though I wretch at his recommending such a horrifying, slow and painful death as ebola as the most efficient means, which shows a want of human compassion). Fascist attitudes are rampant these days. There are plenty of people out there with this sort of mentality. Without his degree and scientific credentials, though, we would call him a psycho--like some mad villain on a James Bond movie. I am appalled when I hear such misanthropy cloaked in the mantle of "reason" and dressed up with noble sounding motives. But it was the standing ovation by his colleagues and the students present that I find so disturbing. Clearly this is evidence that a growing elite of Nazi-like thinkers is gaining prominence. Liberals are fond of comparing those of us who love and want to preserve America and its founding ideals to Nazis because of our nationalism and patriotism, but the new Fascism is not coming from patriots, it's coming from science. If even one of these scientists or future scientists has the means and opportunity to do so, he could unleash the horror that Dr. Pianka describes, and he would feel perfectly justified, believing it is morally superior to inflict a disease that would liquefy the internal organs of nearly all who became infected with the virus in order to "save the planet" than it is to preserve and protect human life.
In several developed countries where birth control has been encouraged and successfully implemented, there is now a deficit of births—there aren't enough children being born to sustain the industries and the economy for the future. There are more old people than young ones to replace them. Thailand and Japan, for example, have had such success getting people to stop having babies that they are now having to encourage couples to have more children. In Europe, as well, many countries have dropped below replacement levels of births, and that is projected to have a negative effect on the economies of those countries. In addition, in some countries where male children are more highly prized for the security they represent to their aging parents, there is a gender imbalance. One shudders to think how countries would resolve that situation.
The problem of "overpopulation" is an invented one, as Austin Ruse, President of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute illustrates in his article "The Myth of Overpopulation and the Folks Who Brought It To You." The world is not overpopulated, it just has a lot of people whom the elite of the world consider "useless eaters", those who, through an accident of birth, were born into the world in abject poverty, and whose ignorance and unwashed presence are an offense and a moral burden to the cultured and intellectually superior of this world. When the population passed 6 billion, I remember reading that the world was producing enough food to feed 9 billion. So the problem is not one of too many people, but one of too little charity. Too often, as Ruse points out, starvation is a weapon of war. I wonder, too, if giving our surplus food away is detrimental to our markets. I don't much care about markets. I do care about needless suffering. Only those who don't would suggest unleashing a gruesome disease like ebola on the world's population. But in the utilitarian eyes of those who would let starvation "cull the herd", a mere two weeks of ebola agony would seem like an act of mercy, I suppose. 
Alisa Craddock is a political columnist and activist in the culture war, a convert to Catholicism, and describes herself as a Christian Libertarian. In addition to Enter Stage Right, her columns have been published on Alain's Newsletter and Out2 News. She may be contacted at acrock43_j@yahoo.com.