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Stop playing God

By BEN NELMS
bnelms@TheCitizenNews.com

Though she dies, Terri Schiavo will live. And in more ways than one.

Those of you who have followed this travesty may recall that Schiavo's husband, Michael, his attorney, many physicians and practically every local, state and federal judge who has heard the case have all agreed that Terri exists in a "persistent vegetative state" and, thus, qualifies her for death by starvation and dehydration (i.e., murder) under current law because Michael claims Terri would not want to live in such a state. He used her alleged words to him as a reason why he has refused for the past 15 years to allow his wife to receive any rehabilitative care. He apparently experienced some type of brainstorm that led him to conclude that his promise to the jury for rehabilitative care for his wife no longer applied once the money was awarded.

If death by dehydration and starvation is so peaceful, as Michael’s attorney continues to insist, and if she can’t “feel” anything, as Bill O’Reilly continues to opine, then why is she receiving morphine suppositories? Aside from Terri herself and those claiming to be Divine, how can anyone truly KNOW how she feels? It’s simple. They can’t.

There are some apsects of the Terrri Schiavo case that the media has all but ingored. As it turns out, our very own U.S. justice system-approved medical theory regarding brain function and consciousness, inspired in part by those such as the theosophist Helena Blavatsky and her brethren in mechanistic and materialistic philosophy (whose worldview helped perpetuate the eugenics movement into the 20th century), provided much of the catalyst for Terri’s death sentence when that worldview made the leap from ideology to “recognized scientific fact” in evolutionary psychology and the neurosciences in the late 20th century. But the Disciples of Death of the 21st century may eventually be shot in the foot by the very Science they so successfully had substituted for God nearly two centuries ago. One example of their hopeful undoing occurred at a late 2003 meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research in Chicago and was referenced last year in the publication, Scientific American Mind. It was the work of Canadian researcher John F. Connolly, showing that a significant percentage of people in vegetative states, even those lifeless and comatose, are exhibiting brain activity previously thought only possible for a fully conscious individual.

At issue in the research is a particular brain wave, referred to as the N400 wave. Connolly and his colleagues focused on N400 when administering an EEG to patients with severe brain injury and considered by current standards to be devoid of cognitive function, hence in a comatose, or vegetative, state. The N400 wave is generated when a person is processing language and when a person encounters spoken or written language that is grammatically correct but semantically incorrect, the report said. When, during an EEG examination, a conscious person hears a phrase such as "the pizza is too hot to sing," the EEG will register the presence of the N400 wave. If the person is not processing language, the N400 wave will not be present, Connolly said. Astonishingly, researchers found that more than half of the 25 comatose subjects tested showed N400 activity, hence the processing of language at some level.

Findings such as those by Connolly was not what the doctor ordered when it comes to the paradigm shift by some in medicine and law who are now the proponents of Terri's death by starvation and dehydration. Nor do such findings suit many of the politicians (originally “the party of the people” Democrats when her tube was first removed in 2003) and ideologues that are salivating at the thought of forcing Terri's death. To their credit, many Democrats today have lined up with the often-vilified “we care more about money than humanity” Republicans, many of whom, in an apparent reversal of media-contrived conventional wisdom, have been by Terri’s side since the beginning. Nor is emerging research likely to suit Terri’s husband, who now has two children by his live-in girlfriend. All Terri’s money reportedly now exhausted, some have wondered if there is a life insurance policy hanging in the balance.

The legacy of Terri Schiavo may well fade from the temporal awareness of American society. But the ramifications of the life taken from her will resonate far longer than her four decades spent among her family and friends. Perhaps the only ones in this vile affair that will be encouraged by the findings of Connolly and others will be Terri's family and friends, the millions of “disabled” people in this country, the countless millions of like-minded citizens and those in the medical and legal communities that support the sanctity of life and those of us who wonder how long it will take for some in the "justice" system and some in the "healing profession" to stop playing God.