Yes it is very different.. but I still think there should be room for a review of the current situation instead of blindly following protocol. The law as helpful as it is, cannot describe everything in this world.
Personally I think if you going to kill someone.. it's better to end it quickly than to starve the person no matter how many drugs you give them. I'm not sure what happened with this baby and why one way of killing is legal but another isn't.
But I am not sure anyone has the right to kill someone anyhow, even though they may suffer it seems wrong to me and I wouldn't want anyone else making that choice for me and I would have a hard time pulling someones plug no matter what.
There are of course nuances to killing, like self defense, suicide, survival and euthanasia. And also the species of killee.
And the fact that we can keep someone alive with machines today really adds to the difficulty of defining euthanasia when the person should never have survived in nature. When is the person really alive, where is the line drawn? Where will technology go in the future? Is there no need to change the laws when the world is changing around us?
All these nuances makes it questionable to have a cookie cutter absolutistic bans that is supposed to apply for all.
I definitely agree with this.
If one is capable of choosing (i.e. old enough, mature enough, and with their faculties intact), then one should be free to choose when to checkout. I find it appalling that the law will not allow me to sign a document right now stating that I choose to die on my terms, when it is my time, without calling it suicide. If I were to do it, my family would be robbed of all the life insurance money that should rightfully be paid to them.
Doesn't that make anyone wonder who really pulls the strings here? Is it a life insurance corporate agenda to keep people from checking out and forcing payouts?
Maybe...maybe not. Probably not. And I digress....
If I'm terminally ill, I should be able to put a gun in my mouth and take care of things my own way. And life insurance companies should payout to my family as if I were allowed to waste away and rot in a hospice bed for months. Is one death ok, and another decidedly more undignified and unworthy? I say no.
The grey area comes into when adults are allowed to decide when others in their family should be put to death. What if I'm old, and rotting, and my kids decide it's time for dad to ride into the sunset so they can get a payout? What if I decide it's not my time, but I'm not considered "mentally there" enough to make that decision. And euthanasia is deemed ok, and the kids get to decide it. I'd still love them if there's an afterlife, and if there isn't, I'm dead and won't care anyways. But I want it to be my call...not the state, or a family member.
I wonder if that little girl felt the same. Or felt nothing at all and it didn't matter. I guess we'll never know. Maybe that's why the debate is so hard to wrestle to the ground.
Who's allowed to kill themselves for humanitarian reasons? Who's not?
Can a parent really decide for a child? Should they? I want to say yes, but I couldn't. Because if it were my little one suffering, as much I'd want to hold onto them forever, it would be my own selfish heart that's doing the thinking. I wouldn't be thinking clearly about my own child's needs. I couldn't bear life without them. I couldn't bear waking up in the middle of the night wondering if there was some tiny sliver of hope and I gave up on them.
Maybe my child would always want to live. Children have a natural fighting spirit that never gives up...a spirit that gets beaten out of us as we grow into adults. You see all these little kids in cancer wings of the hospital (I saw it a lot when my daughter was very ill and spent a while in the hospital)....you know there are adults that if faced with the hell these kids go through, would want to give up. But these kids smile, and laugh, and just go on living. They're not as happy as they could be, but somehow, their joie-de-vivre lets them live on. They're so much stronger than adults.
And if my child is like that, even in a vegetative state, is there not some tiny bit of spirit in their bodies somewhere...some tiny bit of consciousness somewhere crying out to mommy and daddy to just hug them a bit more and not give up on them? How do I know there isn't? Some doctor's word? Some machine? How will I ever live with myself? I'll never know, will I? I'll never know if there was a tiny bit of hope left in their bodies, and I snuffed it out. I will have given up on them.
And I know they'll be dead. So it won't matter to them. But it will matter to me for the rest of my life and haunt me until it crushes every last reason for living out of my body. And I know that's selfish. But I'm honest enough with myself to know where I stand.
I'm admitting I'm not strong enough to do what these parents did, if that is in fact a show of strength. I could never do it. I would simply lay in their beds beside them and hold them until the machines couldn't keep them alive anymore, or my own heart stopped beating and someone else could step in and do what I didn't have the strength or courage or unattachment to do.
Buy my weakness should not prevent another parent who's strong enough to do what I won't. And the heartlessness of a state that forces a parent, who deems this to be appropriate, to have to starve a baby is badly in need of reform.
If you don't think a humane euthanasia is acceptable, then neither is starving a little girl. One cannot be unacceptable and the other acceptable. That kind of laissez-faire attitude doesn't cut it with me. That's laziness and avoiding the complexity and humanity of the situation. But we can't bury our heads in the sand about it.
Reform is needed. And I would vote that parents should have a right to end a child's needless suffering. I would never use the power this law gives me, but it's nice to know bureaucracy and a nanny-state aren't preventing me from doing what is right for my baby. It's not their call. It's mine. It always will be mine. And there's a big difference between murder and euthanasia, and those who don't see the line are shit-disturbers of the most heinous nature.
