Nutbags in the Wake of Terri Schiavo: Ignoring Patient's Rights

What the fuck?!?!?!?!?


Randall Terry Resurfaces: Christian right jumps into Terri Schiavo fray

Legislation currently before the Wisconsin Senate allows doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical personnel who morally disagree with the guidelines regarding feeding and hydration tubes to ignore living wills and advance directives. The legislation already has passed the Republican-controlled Assembly and is likely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate.



These people are pondscum. I can't imagine having my advance directive (which took me hours of painstaking soul-searching to fill out) ignored because some strange nurse decides it's against her religion-of-the-week. What do HER beliefs have to do with MY life, or MY death?

Is there no end to what the Radical Right will do to erode personal rights in this country? I used to think that the old Pharmacy Nutbag (Zen Pretzel Trick: It's Good to Be Persecuted) was an odd man out...I am horrified to see that I was wrong.

I have avoided the Schiavo case on this blog, as it's everywhere already and other bloggers more passionate about the case than I have spoken and spoken well. But this...I just had to speak out.

These nutbags who are using this poor woman as a platform for their agenda make me sick. They keep screaming, "Life begins at conception and ends at natural death!" Well, I disagree with the first part of that...and as for the second, there is nothing natural about Terri's situation at all.

And I can't help but wonder what the woman---not her husband, not her brother, not her parents---would have thought about all that is being done in her name: courts eroding the sanctity of marriage (and by blowhards like Inbred Jeb Bush who will, out of the other side of his crooked mouth, insist that gay marriage must be illegal because IT would threaten the sanctity of marriage), outright public lying about her condition and care, laws being passed that affect millions of people and their right to die with dignity.

I think, with all the "Terri's Laws" and courtroom battles and the crap like the story I posted above, we've forgotten what it all boils down to: who has the right to make decisions for you if you're incapicitated? Your husband, or your parents? Can next-of-kin law be ignored if another relative can't let go? If my second cousin once removed wants me to stay on life support because of her beliefs, does that trump my husband's judgement? And who decides who decides?

Until I read that article, I have only had this to say about the case: I urged people to create, as I have, an advance directive. Make your wishes known in writing, and do it now...because you never know. But now...it seems even that can be denied us. Even the right to choose how we would live and die is being taken away.

What has happened to the land of the free?