Hey all,

This is my response to Joel's latest blog on the Terry Schiavo issue. Joel, I did not want to post this in your trackback in case you didn't want something this heated to occur on your blog. I do not mean to be disrespectful of your opinion. On the contrary, I am intrigued by it and am quite willing to be proven incorrect in my assumptions and assertions. However, I would ask that you would be respectful and fair in return. So here's my response:


Wow, Joel. Was the Schiavo issue that easy for you to determine the rightness and wrongness of? I hear ya, but what about the following? I was talking with Kara about what it must be like to be brain dead-- your soul is still alive... waiting to go somewhere, but everything else about you is dead. In Terry's case, her soul was in limbo, waiting to go to heaven? So that is one thing.

Hospice lets people die like that everyday. I used to volunteer with hospice in H.S.- it's sad, but should we fight for all those people too? I don't really think that's a slippery slope either. Why did we choose to pay attention to Terry Schiavo over all the others? And what about the people who decide not to have life support before their life is even threatened? They didn't put my mom on lifesupport before she died. To follow the logic of your argument would imply that such action is suicide? Since my Dad didn't force it once she became unconscious, was that patient assisted suicide?

Why are we so concerned with preserving life down here when we know there is so much more to be had later on? I'm not saying we should kill people (and I don't think that the doctors, government, or whomever killed Terry), but God didn't create the machine that prolongs life. Do you think that maybe we've taken it into our own hands, sometimes, to prolong the acting out of God's will for some people, by hooking them up to a life machine when it is medically certain that they will not awake?

Sorry for my "defacating mouth," but to call such opinions "godless, arrogant, faithless, heartless, and monstrous" I think is unfair. Especially when you falsely compare such a situation with tossing a child with down's sydrome into a meat hopper. If not for the prolonged use of man's machine, death would have occured long ago. But in the case of the child with Down's syndrome, no machine is needed for life to continue. Simply put, a false and malicious analogy.

Man is not meant to have the power to choose whether another man should live or die-- I think we know we've gone too far when we are faced with that decision. eg: murder, cloning, and when we are able to make a black and white decision to flip the switch to life on or off

I sometimes wonder if we have gone too far in the area of medicine? As soon as we know that one cannot, and will not ever survive without the machine, and will never be conscious, do you think that maybe we are playing God with our machine, just as we would be playing God with the petri dish were we to create a cloned human being?

Realize, Joel, that when you speak in the tone and with the vivacity that you did in your blog, that you close your mind and the conversation. Do you leave room that you may be wrong and that people aren't saying "they should have killed Helen Keller"?

Anyone can respond. I am open to criticism and conversation.

-Holly