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The following was composed as a letter to editors of Kansas newspapers; it combines elements of several commentaries that have been posted to my blog, Veritatis: The Cartoon. For more information about Terri, her family, the appalling injustice they've suffered and to support their efforts against America's culture of death, go to http://www.terrisfight.org/. --JFBThis week marks the fifth anniversary of the court-ordered killing of Terri Schindler Schiavo, an innocent, harmless and defenseless woman who succumbed to two weeks of forced starvation on March 31, 2005.
Make no mistake: The battle to save Terri was a simple matter of right versus wrong. It takes no legal scholar to see this, but a vigorous effort was made to make it seem so. Why? Because our culture of death cannot exist without rhetoric to cloud straightforward issues. Terri Schindler Schiavo was not dying or brain-dead and she wasn't on any kind of life support. Her nutritional needs were being met with the assistance of caregivers, no differently than infants are nursed or toddlers and elderly might be spoon-fed. Despite this, judges, politicians and pundits bent over backward to paint her unworthy of life. Beholden to the all-powerful abortion lobby, they rushed to the cause of an adulterous, impatient and greedy husband who wanted her dead and forgotten.
Indeed, the battle for Terri’s life proved especially nerve-racking for the abortion lobby, its champions in the media and its minions in government. Despite the unqualified success of having created a massive legal altar upon which tens of millions of unborn had been slaughtered, these engineers of industrialized death were well aware of its shaky foundation. So they trivialized, derided, even vilified a disabled woman lying in a Florida nursing home. After all, any legislative action or judicial decision to reinsert her feeding tube might have been viewed as validating her life. And that might have led to validating life in a broader context.
Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. Even before Roe v. Wade, our society had begun disintegrating, devolving toward a loose association of self-centered individuals who tolerate others only to the extent they prove useful. Sen. Barbara Mikulski of Maryland personifies this utilitarian attitude; late last year, she declared abortion "preventive health care." And thanks to the Democrat majority in Congress, Mikulski's diabolic definition is included in their new health care law, permitting anti-life bureaucrats like Health & Human Services boss Kathleen Sebelius to shunt billions to "community health centers" like Planned Parenthood and other purveyors of contraception and abortion.
In the long run, this means fewer and fewer taxpayers and ever deeper cuts in government services. So, who will future Democrats find to pay for their programs? The answer is clear: no one. Rather than increase revenues, they'll decrease expenditures. For Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and like-minded politicians, killing is once again the answer. Just like they've sold abortion to generations indoctrinated in women's rights, they'll sell euthanasia to a shrinking electorate saddled with trillions in debt and a graying population of unproductive consumers. Just as "reproductive health care" became a euphemism for decapitating children in utero, "geriatric health care" will become the polite term for smothering grandparents in bed. All that's needed is to codify it, as some states have begun doing. And as the Catholic bishops and other observers have pointed out, ObamaCare lays the groundwork for it on the federal level.
If ObamaCare is ever fully implemented, it should come as no surprise to many voters when the fate Terri suffered becomes their final reward for having supported America's party of death.
What goes around does, indeed, come around.
