Bloody Federal Courts III

A federal judge on Friday refused to order the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube, yet another setback for the parents of the brain-damaged woman in their battle against her husband to keep her alive.

For a second time, U.S. District Judge James Whittemore ruled against the parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, who had asked him to grant their emergency request to restore her feeding tube while he considers a lawsuit they filed.

From "Blogs for Terri" quoting the lates AP report.

Vatican Radio is more refined than The Inn. No "bloody federal courts" there. Instead it quotes L'Osservatore Romano in referring to the American judiciary as "executioners" of the innocent. One of the aims of Terri's family was to publicize Terri's plight. They seem to have trusted in the natural sympathies of the American public, assuming that people would rise up as a whole demanding justice and life for their daughter. Well it is certainly well-known now. And so many have indeed come to her aid.

But as cynical as I can be, it never occured to me how completely and thoroughly steeped in the culture of death the "major American media" really are. I cited the ghastly L. A. Times piece a couple of days ago which promoted starvation and dehydration as a wonderful way to die. For our cultural masters, anything seems to be acceptable, absolutely anything, if it results in death.

It's even more depressing to listen to the international media. There is no safe haven out there. All of the major outlets seem to have had stories on Terri. The ones I've listened to have been from Radio Australia, Radio Canada International, BBC, and several others that I can't recall off hand. But almost all of them have taken their cue from the American media: Terri is in a deep coma; she is in a persistent vegetative state; she is brain dead; her parents and George Bush are cruel to prevent her dying peacefully; the troglodytic American Right once again resists reason and science.

From what I've heard, the only two outlets expressing even slightly different points of view have been Vatican Radio and Radio Austria International. And Vatican Radio has been pointedly different; referring to the American judiciary as "executioners" is a point of view you won't find in the Times's editorial pages. Radio Austria, however, interviewed the head of the Austrian government board in charge of patient health care, the agency that would review a case like Terri's. (I didn't catch the official name of the bureau.) He said that in Austria Terri would be fed and cared for until natural death. He said that from all he had read she was clearly not dying and had a fairly good chance of recovery.

Unfortunately, the principles he used to arrive on the side of life in this case were all wrong. It wasn't her humanity that assured she would continue to be given food and water but her chances of recovery. It was good to hear someone in authority assert again that Terri could indeed recover. But depressing to find that Austria is no safer than anywhere else in the western world for the chronically sick and disabled.