Human rights and the "right to die"
I have been pondering this issue for awhile, particularly given the extensive media focus on Terry Schiavo. I work on an oncology (cancer) ward and have for six years now. Tonight I asked my co-workers what they thought of the whole "right to die" issue and they were pretty mixed on it as well. The framing of this as a "right to die" or "right to live" issue bothers me personally because as others have argued, I think that it is an entirely personal choice and NOT one to be legislated yet alone taken to a "presidential" level. The question to me, is why this case? Why this family? When does one life and one circumstance merit media attention when countless lives go unreported, unconsidered and without remark? Why is it that the media can put out videos which cause passionate debates over a right to live or die while simultaneously censoring news footage of what "smart bombs" are doing on a daily basis or how many "prisoners/detainees" are dying in custody?
I find it more frustrating to think about how this woman's life is being exploited as a politically expediant morality issue. That said, I feel for her family. I've watched many familes (my own included) grapple with the issues of intubation and of when to "pull the plug." To me, this ties in perfectly with the relationship between politics and the quality of medical care, especially how you are (or can be) defined as a human being, by illness, by politics, by life and by death. I can easily list "issues" that are near and dear to my heart such as the treatment of persons living and coping with AIDS (a single example) or those being tortured and held indefinately as potential threats, but I would like to find a way or see a day in which people are less "issues" upon and through which political games are played.
II.
The cases that make the news are rarely the success stories. More often than not they are the horror stories. I had always thought that once you "pulled the plug" on a ventilated patient or removed their feeding tube they simply died. This is not the case for most people. Some nurses will tell you that to do so means that a person "starves to death" or "drowns" in the fluid in their lungs. They also explain that they will do everything in allowed by law (and their own ethics) to help a person die as painlessly as possible. I have watched nurses refuse to administer morphine (asking another nurse to do it) if they thought it might speed up a person's death because it went against their personal beliefs.
I just wanted to throw out a side I don't think the news is really putting out there. Hospice is not just some throw away space where people go to die alone. Much hospice work is done in the person's home or they can be admitted to a hospice care facility as well. The spectacle surrounded Terry's life and her death really feeds off people's fear: RIGHT to LIFE/RIGHT to DIE as if there were no other questions or points to consider. There are always other points to consider. For example, the book I am reading right now, And the band played on, addresses the early stages of AIDS when political expediency and "morality" fueled a crisis which went underfunded, unresearched and in some cases, welcomed as a "gay plague." This to me begs the question, when does a person become less a person because of a disease or an illness or for that matter a socially constructed category of difference? Likewise, when does a person become relevant enough to become the face or "heart" if you will, of a cause? My "understanding" of the AIDS crisis came from Ryan White's battle with the school system, NOT with Rock Hudson. How many people died before Ryan White's face hit my television screen and woke me up out of my little world? How many lives are lost to AIDS minute by minute while political expediancy and those screaming "morality" tie up funding for research AND programs that are not abstinance-only based? Why are these questions not being asked and hotly debated? I wish they were.
1 Comments:
Jen,
A VERY thoughtful post. Like you, I think that to "choose sides" is to miss much larger issues, ones that are much harder to think about and certainly are NOT suited to discussion via soundbites--or, for that matter, in Congress.
I was struck by this statement in your post:
This to me begs the question, when does a person become less a person because of a disease or an illness or for that matter a socially constructed category of difference? Likewise, when does a person become relevant enough to become the face or "heart" if you will, of a cause?
I noticed it because it struck me that, especially with regard to what I'd heard of her parents' rhetoric, Terri Schiavo had become infantilized at best. She of course IS their child, and I do understand that one of their arguments against Michael Schiavo's being designated as her guardian is that he is their daughter's husband only in the most tenuous of legal senses. But: absent any proof to the contrary, it was as an adult that Ms. Schiavo expressed a wish regarding her care should she ever become incapable of expressing that wish herself. This is cynical of me, even as I also understand that the Schindlers quite naturally don't want to see their daughter die (what parent would?), but I can't help but think, in the case of the Schindlers' alledged supporters, that because Ms. Schiavo is incapacitated, it's as though she not only has ceased to be an adult, her present state now renders moot all her statements as an adult. Whatever Mr. Schiavo's other motives for his position, that position, to me, seems most respectful of Ms. Schiavo's continuing status as an adult.
One other observation, then I'll close: One line of rhetoric in this whole saga runs along the lines of "How can there not be a law that makes more difficult the witholding of life-sustaining measures in cases such as this?" Indeed, the Kansas legislature is working on just such a bill. But in Texas, you may have heard, a law was passed not too long ago that makes it legal, in cases such as Schiavo's, for hospitals, over the objections of family members, to cease offering life-sustaining measures after 10 days if a patient or his/her family has no means to pay besides Medicaid. This, to my mind, is a far more troubling matter; it is a symptom of an already-underfunded public health system whose underfunding is perpetuated by many of the same Congresspeople who said that refusing to sustain Ms. Schiavo's life would be "murder." So what is it called when a state refuses to sustain life? And what does the absence of an outcry about such things from those who say they support a "culture of life" say about the meaning of such a term or about the belief system of those who use it?
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