Michael stinks. He’s a cad and a bounder who lived off the largesse of his in-laws until he had his malpractice settlement. He’s got a girlfriend with whom he’s had two children. But he’s put his trust in the judicial system and competent neurologists who will not profit in any way from presenting their findings of evaluations of Terri.

The Schindlers stink more. They’ve surrounded themselves with toadies who don’t give a f*** about Terri. They know a cash cow when they see one, as do the Schindlers. They could have easily taken Terri home with them ten years ago when they had the chance. Indeed they did. What they found out was that their daughter was physically incapable of surviving without ’round the clock skilled nursing care. As soon as Michael banked his malpractive settlement they started going for the bucks. They’ve filed fifteen or twenty suits in court to get their way, all of which fly in the face of law, ethics, and morality.

Those who claim to have the moral high road in this case seem to have forgotten that there is an alternate morality, one that says that it is cruel to force a soul to remain trapped in a body that is little more than a vehicle for metabolism.

They throw out borderline cases, cases in which there is potential for recovery, potential for engagement in the external world. Terris has no such potential. She will never be engaged in the external world. She will always be a vehicle for digesting nutrition and excreting it and little more.

That is worse than death. Your morality claims that that is better than death. Your beliefs could be wrong, my beliefs could be wrong.

The main difference between the two moral positions is that those who argue that Terri must retain her physical state argue at the same time that the funding that enables her to have ’round the clock skilled nursing care are the same people who seek to eliminate government funding of skilled nursing care.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot on the one hand campaign for Terri to continue to require skilled nursing care while at the same time campaign to have the funds that provide the skilled nursing care to be eliminated.

You assert that Terri can swallow her own saliva. She cannot do that. Her saliva must be vacuumed out periodically lest she choke on it.

It matters little whether one is a neurologist. All that one needs to be is the aide who bathes Terri day in and day out, who changes her dressings and her bed clothes. Had anyone who argues that the moral high road is that which keeps Terri “alive” had that experience of caring for these bodies, they would be actively campaigning to allow her to leave this physical plateau and travel on to her next stage of being.

It is inconsistent to assert a belief in God and heaven while at the same time forcing a soul to remain in the physical world when all the body that contains that soul is capable of is reflexive responsrd unrelated to external events and metabolizing nutrients delivered by tube.

An alternate view is that God is waiting for her to arrive in heaven, and he looks down upon the circus that has accumulated around this woman and wonders what he has done in creating human life. In the Garden he gave us Free Will. He sent us out into the world to find our way back to Him. He did not invent the technology that enables human beings to “survive” past the point where anything but technology can keep them breathing and metabolizing. God did not intend for us to need catheters to evacuate urine, nor did He intend for us to have enemas at regular intervals to clean out the lower bowel. He did not intend for us to develop life-threatening bedsores, and he did not intend for us to require tubes down our throats or needles in our veins to perpetuate our time in the physical plane. He gave us roads out of the physical plane when we reached the point when these things were required to keep us on earth.

Perhaps He is happy that paraplegics and quadraplegics and the blind and the deaf and the autistic and the multiple amputees of the world are capable of leading productive lives. Odds are that He is, for such people have Free Will. But He is miserable to watch someone who will never have Free Will again to be deprived of the ability to move to another plane, to a place in which she will be made whole again.

And he is bloody well pissed off to watch resources be poured into a machine for metabolism when there are eight-month-old children who will die in the next week because they are deprived of simple pharmaceutical interventions. Each of these eight-month-olds have the potential for changing the world. Terri Schiavo will never be capable of doing anything but metabolising nutrients and being evacuated of waste.

You might say that the severely mentally retarded are in the same category as Terri Schiavo, but she is not. Every psychologically active human being has the potential for exerting a positive influence on the world around them. Terri has no potential other than to drain resources in a world in which there are not infinite resources.

You can take your morality to the nursing homes and hospices where there are 23-year old men who can have erections but will never leave their beds and who will never be able to talk to another human being; where there are 90-year-old women whose bodies are paralyzed by decay who cannot leave their chairs and who cannot communicate with the outside world; where there are men who have had strokes that have deprived them of everything that made their lives worthwhile. You can bathe them and you can hold them and you can feed them, but you can only trap them in their bodies. You cannot do anything but prevent them from leaving their bodies and finding peace in the next world.

If you take such a challenge on, you will learn what morality is.

1. How many of the Health care professionals named above have gone on record and states that Terri Schiavo is not at this moment in a PVS?

2. How many reading this blog knew about the baby in Texas who was allowed to die against her mother’s found out about it independently from the Schiavo case ?