Posted on 06/08/2005 1:34:37 PM PDT by MsGail61
no, we would rather pay for all that then give some 5 yro a needed vaccine.....
Well, it certainly sounds as if the Schiavo euthanasia case is causing some on the left to run a little scared... hence this strange, twisted attempt at deflecting it all back on those who were in opposition. It all boils down to an irrational statement such as "Yeah, we'd pull feeding tubes from anyone sufficiently disabled as to not be able to protest, but you're worse because you might theoretically limit any benefits due to this person at some future date." Theirs really is a culture of death, isn't it?
go tie down a 92 yro so they won't crawl out of bed or pull out their tubes, and then we can talk about evil.....
its evil to keep human beings like animals...just evil....
Jesus meant for us to die...HE would wonder why HIS people were so afraid of dying that they would resort to what we do to the elderly now......
The delay of death in my opinion was established solely for organ donation, i.e., medical technology. Life-support, and I do not mean a feeding tube, is standard operating procedure now-a-days. As I stated, maybe we should quit with the medical technology so people die when they "normally" would.
my grandmother just died at 92. Over the last four years she gradually lost all abilities, except being able to brighten up when she saw someone she loved. She had said she didn't want any tubes or iv's, so when she came down with an infection and stopped eating and drinking much, it killed her - but it still took close to a month. No hospitals or any treatment but what she could take by mouth.
What really hurt is when family members said she wasn't there any more. She lost so much but the last part of her left was love, and they couldn't see it.
I am not sure that is true, it was not discussed or proposed in any of my own family members who have taken ill, been hospitalized and died, but then again, most had cancers that were terminal, and so were not candidates for organ 'harvest'.
There certainly are injuries and illnesses that require temporary life support or feeding tubes, where people recover from need of them. I think there becomes a point where there just is no hope of recovery from need of machine. When the patient is vegatative or comatose with no reasonable expectation of consciousness, I think many of us would say that further prolonging has a diminishing return... For the patient, and for the family whose lives are ALL consumed by an emergency without end.
When it comes to the guilty, or those who conspire to have the innocent killed, there may be room for some debate.
Is that old coot still around?
The loss of the life savings and homes and sustainability of the whole family most certainly is a real factor people live with and lose when caring for a family member. It's not avoidable or solvable, it just is. And to discount the future effect on the whole family that the loss of that ~fortune~ will have as merely 'unimportant' is crass. It has a huge effect on the resources and dreams the entire family can have.
There are situations that warrant that sacrifice and more. There are also situations that one might argue are futile burning of the resources and futures of the living, for no hope of return. ~That~ is sad, and I don't think it's wrong to acknowledge that the loss is real.
What I'd really like to know Hildy is if you have some really, really excellent adult stem cells on you.
Won't be long and those of us who might need them can arrange for a harvest ~ and who are you to stand in the way of relatively healthy folks with many more years of productive enterprise in them?
Hmmmm!
From what I understand we can't just dig around in there if we want to get them all ~ it has to be a full flensing followed by a quite rigorous decanting.
Jesus raised the dead and healed the sick.
Wow, the nightmare of Soylent Green has finally come true!
"... the Bush administration ... continues to fight for the evisceration of Social Security." What utter leftist claptrap! Sadly, too many will swallow the crap whole. The author of the piece appears to have taken her cue from the AARP TV ad where the house is destroyed because the sink is stopped up. Only raising taxes is the solution to the socialists.
Due to a misunderstanding of how the immune system works, there's this idea that embryonic stem cells can be used to produce some sort of universal "donor" stem cells that won't be rejected by the recipient.
Funniest thing, though, is they all turn into cancer cells except when identical twins (or the mouse equivalent) are used.
Still, there's all this research being done on immunological questions, and it's just a matter of time until we can secure organ-specific stem cells from a donor and transplant them into a needy recipient.
No question at all there are going to be superior "donors" identified, and there will be more demand than can be satisfied with a few cells here and there.
Listen real carefully to the bioethicists in this debate. Think of what they are saying when it comes to a potentially superior donor. It's regular death camp stuff Fur Shur, particularly when you give consideration to the fact that harvesting an already adult donor is undoubtedly cheaper than growing these things in the lab!
What you said.
Agreed that in this situation circumstances were probably not such that EMT arrived at the scene or the situation was such an emergency that life-support was hooked up and the hospital's determination was similar. Age may not apply in the circumstances you state but I believe it is relevant when it comes to standard procedure and life-support measures. You most likely will not be hooked up or given life-support measures unless you can be a potential organ donar.
I think there becomes a point where there just is no hope of recovery from need of machine. When the patient is vegatative or comatose with no reasonable expectation of consciousness, I think many of us would say that further prolonging has a diminishing return...
I agree with what you say but that decision is in the hands of the person and if the person has the will to live beyond the time to control that situation I do not believe we have the right to commit them to a death of convenience. The will to live is very strong no matter what the circumstance.
For the patient, and for the family whose lives are ALL consumed by an emergency without end.
I do not understand this statement.
For the patient, and for the family whose lives are ALL consumed by an emergency without end.
I do not understand this statement.
What I mean to say is that when there is a family member on life support or in prolonged critical care, the entire family stops functioning, and relvolves around the care of the patient. That's just what happens. I have certainly lived through this for short durations... short meaning up to a year of "emergency priorities" where nothing else happens and you do whatever it takes for the time it takes... but it would be agony to live with the expectation there there is no end in sight... That it will conceivably always be like that, even potentially consuming all the time, dreams and resources the whole family has. It's a family acting in emergency mode.... without end.
Vividly poignant.
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