Terri's Day and nation's independence protects life culture

America's Culture of Life is truly the legacy of one woman whose death forever changed our nation because of actions that were not in her hands but in those of her husband and his lawyers. Yet for millions of Americans we will forever link our own celebration of our nation's independence to the courage of the Schindler family to go forward past the tragedy, past the personal sorrow, past the searing anguish to help America draw a distinct line in the sand, to issue a clarion call to America.

Our 4th of July is coming... Our Culture of Life Independence Day is on its way. Our month of Independence is a message that March 31st (Terri's Day) will signal, that July 4th will signal... and that the month of July will signal to defend the Culture of Life before we lose it forever.

When we talked with our family members or even our neighbors or our friends we may have spent but a moment reflecting upon why we are even gathered on a Memorial Day afternoon. Do we think about the sacrifice of our soldiers and of their families? Do we think about the long goodbyes which are never long enough... as the military families send their loved ones to war, to battle, to stand firm for our freedoms... for our life... for our nation and its values of faith?

How does Terri Schiavo and her legacy tie into this? Terri's legacy and Terri's Day is a representation of a right to live, and freedom to have the liberty to not have it compromised away, devalued by inconvenience, or litigated away by judges who celebrate a culture of death that would rob life from the womb, steal life from a hospital or hospice bed, and destroy and shatter a family's love for a daughter, a sister and aunt who was given a gift from God, but had it separated from her as easily as an ant would have its life take by an uncaring shoe... extinguished forever.

The families who send their loved ones off to war have to wonder as well, does America value their sacrifice? The families of the military have to wonder just where does its society draw the line on its values? A soldier who is in battle in Iraq or Afghanistan has to wonder if a Florida judge can take away the life of an innocent, what is the measure of his life? Would a judge in America suddenly decide that if he were injured, if he had to sacrifice a limb that the protesters outside his hospital bed would have more rights than he would or his family? Would this soldier have to wonder that if he or his fellow soldier were killed in battle, that upon their return that the protesters who would stand outside of his funeral... have more rights to be protected than the rights his family would have to a military burial with honor?

You see, the Culture of Life is about Terri Schiavo, because Americans now have to examine the life of our culture itself. We have to wonder if we as a nation of Christians and of a nation of faith and of a nation of compassion would allow for a state to murder an innocent woman and strip her family of their loved one then as a nation would we allow America to have other symbols of life, of our nation to be peeled away as well, all in open sight and in plain view of a dispassionate nation?

What does our American Culture mean if we allow millions of illegal aliens to literally browbeat us into submission by demanding that because they have stolen across our borders, demanded and received protection from local law enforcement in numerous cities throughout the U. S., obtained free or reduced educational opportunities by state public colleges that our own children could not qualify to receive the same financial aid assistance for. Are we that defenseless to let illegals strip our state coffers of housing assistance for loans and mortgages when tens of thousands in almost every state in America have legal citizens who are homeless, impoverished, or working poor or middle class Americans who need similar assistance but cannot receive it. And they are legal! They are citizens! They are Americans.

What is so wrong about our nation when we are so ready to compromise our freedoms, our culture's life, the life of an innocent and the taking of any life is the taking of our own children's life and their child's. And with each successive generation the nation and its life, its values, its traditions, and its language will disappear because we as Americans were too preoccupied — too narrow — to see that an illegal alien was taking your child's education, that a crusading death culture judge was preparing a bed, a room, a legal precedent to take your child, grandchild or sister or parent.

That is why I have stayed my course to defend the Culture of Life and to ask my fellow Americans to begin to understand that as Terri Schiavo's life was slowly ebbing from her body and as her mother Mary, father Bob, sister Suzanne, and brother Bobby waited in the Florida early morning air on March 31st, 2005, America was having part of its soul ebb away as well.

What will it take to spark an interest, a concern, and a passion for protecting one's own life? Some may say that it would take a clear and present danger — like tanks rolling down your neighborhood street or another 9/11 that strikes at the heart of America. Do we have the convenience to wait? Do we wait until a state legislature in Maine or California or Delaware or Ohio or Illinois decides that your mother's decision to live is determined by a hospital "bean counter" who decides that your mother's life is not based upon a "Will To Live" but an ability to pay her bill? What about a baby, not born, but already set for murder in the womb — not because the mother is pro-life or pro-death but because "the law" says the unborn baby's life is expendable because the baby's genes are determined to be part of a class or a group or a race or of an ethnicity which pre-programs the child, un-born, to death?

America is being murdered in small pieces. It is seeing its values, its life, its culture disemboweled with the finesse of a skilled surgeon. And it is America's poll takers and its legislators and its uncaring, disinterested, and uninvolved who are handling the scalpel. Take the scalpel away. Contact www.Terrisfight.org to join the Foundation's battle to educate America about the right to live. Go to Terri's Day on www.kevinfobbs.com to learn about new updates on Terri's Day and the event to celebrate the Culture of life.

So on Independence Day and Independence month of July will we have any Americans who will sign up and join the Culture of Life movement in their community? Even if it is to sign a pledge, hand out a flyer, become aware of legislators and judicial candidates who have agreed to stand firm for the Culture of Life — a crusade that is based not only upon the life of Terri Schiavo's legacy but equally crucial based also upon the legacy of the right to live, to defend our culture and the life of its values.

Terri's Day is not the end of a national movement but the beginning of a national contract with itself to stand for a future that our nation can guarantee for its children and for a culture that will insure life. The right to live will be Terri's legacy — our legacy... one nation under God. Join us in your homes, on your family picnics, out camping and celebrating July 14th and 15th ... Our American Culture of Life belongs to each and every one of us... We must protect it. Let's celebrate together.

Kevin Fobbs is President of National Urban Policy Action Council (NuPac), a non-partisan civic and citizen-action organization that focuses on taking the politics out of policy to secure urban America's future one neighborhood, one city, and one person at a time. View NuPac on the web at www.nupac.info. Kevin Fobbs is a regular contributing columnist for the Detroit News. He is also the host of The Kevin Fobbs Show: go to: ,www.kevinfobbs.com. To contact him go to: kevin@kevinfobbs.com.

This is odd. Medical "ethicists" have decided it's wrong for doctors to participate in the execution of convicted criminals, but it's okay to directly execute innocent victims. Art Caplan gets his two-cents worth in here. What a pimple he is.

Do healers have a place in the death chamber? - The Dallas Morning News
Courts may hear call for clinical execution, but doctors sworn to save lives
01:28 AM CDT on Sunday, June 25, 2006
By LAURA BEIL / The Dallas Morning News

If convicted murderer Angel Maturino Resendiz, known as the Railroad Killer, is put to death on Tuesday, he will owe his quiet end to medical science. Had doctors not concocted a lethal series of infusions more than 20 years ago, Texas prisoners still would be dying by electrocution.
The profession charged with healing has worked to refine the business of killing since French surgeon Joseph Guillotin sought a more civilized execution for the condemned. In the more than 200 years since Dr. Guillotin's name became synonymous with beheading – an "e" was later added to the machine named for him – medical professionals have given guidance in making the death penalty more compassionate, whether by gas chamber, electric chair or, more recently, drugs.
Yet medical ethicists long ago determined this is wrong. Execution, which is hardly in the best interest of the patient, is not the practice of medicine, and doctors are sworn to save lives, not take them. With the latest court challenges to lethal injection – challenges that cite the possibility of significant pain for the immobilized prisoner – the criminal justice system might need medicine's help to keep the death penalty constitutional. Physicians could again find themselves at the nexus of two conflicting values: society's moral and legal obligation to execute without cruelty, and a doctor's sworn obligation to do no harm.
"The basic question is whether medicine has a role in addressing more competent and compassionate ways of executing people," Peter Clark, a medical ethicist at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia, wrote this spring in the Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics.
Dr. Clark is a theologian. To him, the answer is clear. "I was appalled that the medical profession was even involved in this," he said in an interview.
Many physicians, though, are more ambivalent. In 2001, a research team described a survey of 1,000 randomly selected doctors from rosters provided by the American Medical Association, the professional society that has unequivocally said involvement in execution is unethical. The doctors were asked whether they would be willing to participate in 10 aspects of lethal injection, eight of which have been deemed wrong for physicians.
To researchers' surprise, 41 percent said they would perform at least one of the actions, which included placing the intravenous lines or supervising the administration of injections.
What about personally giving the final drugs? "I suspected that I'd find that no physician would be willing," said Dr. Neil Farber of Christiana Care Health System in Delaware. Instead, 19 percent said they would.
These doctors usually were not motivated by the belief that they might relieve the suffering of someone who was going to die anyway, Dr. Farber said, though some felt that way. Overwhelmingly, those physicians willing to kill cited their obligations to a state that has said execution is legal and correct.
"They're not seeing it as a conflict," Dr. Farber said. "This is a duty to society."
So it is not that surprising that corrections officials have found physicians willing to participate in capital punishment – some states even require their presence. Dr. Atul Gawande, a surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, recently found four physicians and one nurse who would discuss their reasoning. Dr. Gawande wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine in March that these medical professionals typically didn't make a conscious decision to assume the role of executioner.
"Virtually all of them were brought into the death chamber to pronounce death," he said last week.
Merely being present seems straightforward enough. But executions don't always go smoothly. Technicians can have trouble finding a suitable vein. The dosage of the drug may be inadequate.
"Suddenly all eyes turn to you," Dr. Gawande said.
Their participation was an incremental journey, as in many descents into questionable behavior.
Dr. Gawande supports the death penalty, as do the majority of doctors surveyed. But after talking to those physicians who have witnessed it, he says he began to wonder whether capital punishment is possible without medical supervision.
After 859 lethal injections, it is viewed almost as a rote act. "The trouble is," he said, "there is a large percentage of the time that there is some complication in that regimented approach that requires medical expertise to sort it out."
In 1982, during the first lethal injection in a Texas state prison, two doctors reportedly were on hand only to pronounce death. Yet they were asked advice about the proper injection site, Dr. Gawande said, and the prison official incorrectly mixed the chemicals.
What if a physician finds a heartbeat when it is time to declare a prisoner dead? Offer advice on how to finish him off?
If executions cannot be completed without physicians or nurses, Dr. Gawande believes the death penalty should be abandoned. Tending to the problems of lethal injection is not a doctor's job, he said, and violates public trust. He even would like to see physician involvement legally banned.
"Since the total responsibility for execution rests with the criminal justice system, it's up to the criminal justice system to deal with it," said Dr. Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota Medical School. Dr. Miles has examined the circumstances that lead doctors to have a role in torture and execution.
Corrections officials and the public desire a clinical patina to the administration of the death penalty, he said, largely to make people feel more comfortable. "We're trying to make it sterile," he said. "We're trying to tame execution."
The legal question now is whether it has been tamed enough to meet the requirements set forth in the U.S. Constitution.
Dr. Miles does believe that the current three-drug combination is probably a painful death, masked by an induced paralysis. If prisoners are suffocating, they would have the feeling of being buried alive, he said. If they are improperly anesthetized, the potassium chloride would send a searing pain through the veins as it flowed toward the heart.
As a human being, these scenarios bother him, but as a doctor, he would not offer a solution.
"The question of whether executions should be pain-free is a social policy question," he said, not a medical one.
For that reason, Dr. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics, believes that the profession should excuse itself from the entire debate. If people want flawless executions, he said, then states should create professional executioners.
"The state wants them there," Dr. Caplan said of doctors, "so the state can feel more comfortable."
Dr. Miles puts it this way: If a nation decided to punish adulterers by stoning, it would be wrong for a doctor to give the condemned anesthesia beforehand to lessen the pain. That would send a message of tacit approval and soothe the conscience of those imposing the sentence.
Because a white coat can make capital punishment seem more palatable, some doctors who are involved with executions ultimately find themselves troubled. After the introduction of the guillotine, executions became routine in revolutionary France. Dr. Guillotin grew appalled by his infamy from a killing device. But execution was by then the will of the people, and beyond the influence of medicine.
E-mail lbeil@dallasnews.com lbeil@dallasnews.com

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