by David Gibbs
If you have a being that is not sentient, that is not even aware, then the killing of that being is not something that is wrong in and of itself. I think that a chimpanzee certainly has greater self-awareness than a newborn.3
Why stop with infanticide? Marvin Olasky of World magazine asked Singer about those who might elect to raise children just to harvest their organs. The exchange revealed something most disturbing about the direction of attitudes toward the preciousness of life. Here’s the key part of that interview:
OLASKY: What about parents conceiving and giving birth to a child specifically to kill him, take his organs, and transplant them into their ill older children?
SINGER: It’s difficult to warm to parents who can take such a detached view, [but] they’re not doing something really wrong in itself.
OLASKY: Is there anything wrong with a society in which children are bred for spare parts on a massive scale?
SINGER: No.4
Peter Singer hasn’t just stepped onto the slippery slope of moral relativism—he’s grabbed his sled and pushed off with gusto. Human life, according to this Princeton professor, isn’t necessarily sacred. That’s a quaint notion held by ‘‘know-nothing religious fundamentalists.’’ In his view, it’s possible for animal life to be superior to human life. Writing in the July 1983 edition of Pediatrics, Singer said:
If we compare a severely defective human infant with a nonhuman animal, a dog, a pig, for example, we will often find the nonhuman to have superior capacities, both actual and potential, for rationality, self-consciousness, communication, and anything else that can plausibly be considered morally significant. Only the fact that the defective infant is a member of the species homo sapiens, leads it to be treated differently from the dog or pig.5
But wait, there’s more.
In Singer’s book Practical Ethics he states, ‘‘The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species homo sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it’’6 (emphasis added). How can he arrive at such a statement?
By doing what the courts did in the case of Terri Schiavo: They removed God and any moral considerations from their judgment. Singer makes his hostility toward the Judeo-Christian view of life perfectly clear. He writes: ‘‘We can no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form of creation, made in the image of God, singled out from all other animals, and alone possessing an immortal soul.’’7 Rather than being fired from Princeton, a school originally founded to promote the gospel of Jesus Christ, for advocating such an outrageous, irresponsible, and pro-infanticide dogma, Professor Singer is considered a visionary in the field of bioethics and throughout academia. Not everyone on the left side of the political spectrum is happy about Singer’s message, however. Some have awakened and realized the frightening reality that having a disability may be deadly.
Take Eleanor Smith.
This self-described ‘‘liberal agnostic’’ has been confined to a wheelchair due to childhood polio. In the wake of Terri Schiavo’s court- ordered death—a death sentence supported by the American Civil Liberties Union—Smith says, ‘‘At this point I would rather have a right-wing Christian decide my fate than an ACLU member.’’8 Why? Because she knows that most people of faith view all of life as worth living—not just the lives of those ones who are pretty, healthy, or productive. Maybe she also knows that the line between the ‘‘right to die’’ and the ‘‘duty to die’’ is razor thin.
A HIGHER PURPOSE
I could tell that the McCurdys’ commitment to their son Clinton didn’t come easy for them. As we were about to part company, Betty searched my eyes. She said, ‘‘You know, David, it’s really hard to have a child that is this disabled. As a mother, you want your child to recognize you, to appreciate you, and to communicate with you.’’
As a father of four children, I understood where she was coming from. What amazed me was where she was going with her insight.
‘‘Whenever I start to feel bad for myself,’’ she said, ‘‘I realize everything I’m upset about has to do with things I want for me. And in those moments, I have to turn my thinking around and say, ‘God, you’ve given me this child. When you gave him to me, he was a healthy boy. You’ve allowed this disability into his life. I’ve got to accept the fact that I’m not going to get what I want. He won’t recognize me or appreciate me—that’s what I want, but not what you’ve given to me. Help me to embrace what you’ve given me.’’’
The contrast between her unconditional love and the utilitarian worldview espoused by Peter Singer couldn’t be more striking.
Tim and Betty McCurdy’s silent sacrifice of love is an acknowledgment that life isn’t always about getting what we want. It’s about accepting what God brings our way. In that respect, Michael Schiavo didn’t get what he wanted; he got what God allowed into his life. Rather than accept Terri’s disability as a sovereign act of God, he chose to believe that Terri wanted what he wanted for her—namely, to die.
Sadly, Clinton passed away on February 4, 2006. He is survived by his loving parents, Tim and Betty, and his three brothers. His funeral was preached at the First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, just three months after I met him there.
Clinton, you touched my life, and I thank you for that. And thank you, Betty and Tim, for putting Clinton’s needs above your own and showing us a wonderful example of unconditional love.
The question remains: How might you and I handle a life-and-death decision should God place a severely disabled spouse, daughter, son, or parent into our lives? Would we, like the McCurdys or the Schindlers, and at no benefit to ourselves, help care for, appreciate, and love someone who has little or nothing to give back? If so, to paraphrase Scripture, when you’ve done this for the least of these, you’ve done it for God himself.
Let me ask you a question. What if the key that unlocks the door to personal fulfillment in your life just happened to be in giving unconditional love to what the Bible calls ‘‘the least of these’’?
We have to be very careful when we say disabled people can’t contribute to society. Think about this: Terri touched the world because her parents were willing to fight for her life. If they hadn’t, if they had said, ‘‘Oh well, these bad things happen, we’ll just let her go,’’ we never would have heard of Terri. Because of their commitment, Terri Schiavo had a far greater impact than many people who can speak or walk.
She touched the nation and the world with her life.
I’d say that’s a life worth living.
CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE
EVERY DAY’S A GIFT
The fatalistic attitude toward treating brain disease is very prevalent—and untrue. All too often, people give up. We’ve all been humbled by the brain’s ability to recover.
—DR. OWEN B. SAMUELS, CHIEF OF NEUROINTENSIVE CARE, EMORY UNIVERSITY1
When Judge George Greer ordered the suspension of Terri’s nutrition and hydration on November 22, 2002, he was preoccupied with the quality of Terri’s life. He wrote, ‘‘The real issue in this case, however, deals with treatment options for Terry [sic] Schiavo and whether or not they will have any positive affect [sic] so as to ‘significantly improve her quality of life.’ ’’ He concluded that Terri’s chance of improving was slim to none, and therefore, without even offering a window of opportunity to try therapy, she should die.
I wish Judge Greer had invited any one of the following seven living miracles to the witness stand before taking such a dim view of Terri’s chances for improvement. Each has emerged from a comatose or persistent vegetative state, often continuing to live amazing lives. Come to think of it, arranging an appearance would have been easy to accomplish. After all, one of these formerly comatose patients attended several days of Terri’s trial in Judge Greer’s own courtroom.
Meet Brooke Becker of Clearwater, Florida, who lived near to where Terri’s tragedy unfolded.
At age twenty, Brooke and her boyfriend were driving home from
her summer job when a truck slammed into her car door. Rescue teams struggled for forty-five minutes to cut her free from the mangled vehicle. Precious minutes were lost at a time when life and death were measured in seconds. A helicopter rushed Brooke to the Bayfront Medical Center, where trauma specialists assessed her condition.
In short, Brooke suffered from a ruptured spleen, a fractured liver, a pelvis that had been crushed, a broken collarbone, and a jaw broken in two places. Two collapsed lungs complicated her condition—and that wasn’t even the worse part of her injuries. She experienced such traumatic brain damage, she fell into a deep coma. Even though Brooke was given no chance of survival—let alone a quality of life on par with Terri’s disabled condition—her doctors performed a seven-hour emergency surgery that required more than thirty pints of blood supplements.
Her parents waited and prayed.
Four months after remaining in a comatose state, fed through a feeding tube, the miraculous occurred: Brooke began to improve. Six months after the near-death accident, in spite of the fact that the doctors had no hope for her survival, Brooke was sent home partially paralyzed yet alert. She remained on a feeding tube for two years while receiving physical therapy.
Today she lives with her parents. Although requiring the aid of a wheelchair, Brooke attends and participates at Calvary Baptist Church with her family. And though her eyesight was damaged by the accident and she cannot speak without the help of a computerized voice synthesizer, Brooke has learned to express herself through art. In fact, her paintings are so stunning, they’re frequently sold by commission.
From comatose to competent artist—that’s remarkable.
I first met Brooke during a hearing before Judge Greer. I found her smile infectious. Here was a formerly healthy, young college woman whose life had been forever impaired in an instant, yet who felt compelled to support Terri by coming to court. Why? She knew from personal experience what beating the odds was all about. She was living proof. Thankful that her family and her doctors had not given up on her, Brooke hoped her story would encourage the Schindlers in their battle to give Terri the same chance at a new beginning.
I know her presence inspired me.
COMATOSE IN CALIFORNIA
In 1996 twenty-one-year-old Theresa de Vera was a junior at Loyola Marymount University, where she was actively involved in campus life. Volleyball, outdoor water sports, socializing with friends—all of that would change in a split second. Theresa was riding with her mother, Rudy, on the freeway when she passed out from a severe asthmatic attack. By the time Rudy reached Glendale Adventist Hospital, Theresa was blue, unresponsive, and not breathing.
She was slumped over in the backseat, dead.
The nursing staff rushed Theresa inside, where they confirmed she wasn’t breathing, she had no pulse, and she had no blood pressure. According to the emergency personnel who first assessed her condition, Theresa was clinically dead, having suffered cardiopulmonary arrest. After aggressive measures to resuscitate her, Theresa jerked back to life and then, thirty minutes later, went into a seizure. She settled into a deep coma and continued on a respirator for two weeks with no change in her condition.
At that point her doctors worked to persuade the family to give up hope and harvest Theresa’s organs while they were still viable. A shouting match erupted in the hospital; the family argued for her life while the doctors maintained she was in a persistent vegetative state. They assured the family there was nothing more to be done.
Theresa was gone.
For four months Theresa remained in a deep coma.
She didn’t smile. She didn’t laugh.
She didn’t move. She didn’t cry.
She exhibited none of these signs of life that Terri routinely displayed. As a spokeswoman from the hospital later reported, ‘‘Her condition was so severe and her chance of recovery so small—virtually zero—that any recovery would be like Karen Ann Quinlan, really never waking up again. They did recommend that the family terminate treatment.’’
That would have been a big mistake. Why? With her family and her church praying, Theresa defied the prognosis.
She awakened.
Not only that, she regained her upper body mobility, her speech, and the ability to feed herself. As Theresa is now fond of saying to others with disabilities, ‘‘Never allow your disability to become your inability.’’ Those are not empty words. With persistence and hard work, Theresa returned to Loyola Marymount University and graduated with the class of 2004.
Theresa’s comeback was so dramatic, she and her family appeared on Oprah. One of Theresa’s attending physicians sat in the front row of the audience. After confirming the details of her trauma, the clearly stunned doctor said, ‘‘I have to tell you, [her condition is] usually associated with really, really severe brain damage. I’ve never seen anybody come back from something like that. What has happened here defies medical logic. . . . It’s a miracle.’’
His assessment echoed that of the hospital spokeswoman, who said, ‘‘This is such an unusual outcome that we call it a miracle because we can’t explain it medically. There is no reason this child should have woken up.’’2 Of course, while God doesn’t always heal in such dramatic ways, He is fully able to do the impossible—medically or otherwise. That’s the message of Jeremiah 32:27, ‘‘Behold, I am the Lord, the God of all flesh: is there any thing too hard for Me?’’
On March 19, 2005, when news reached Theresa that Terri’s feeding tube had been removed, she knew what she needed to do. She and her mother packed her wheelchair and took the red-eye flight from California to join Terri’s vigil outside the hospice, where she had an opportunity to meet and share her journey of healing and restoration with Bob and Mary Schindler.
TRIAL BY FIRE
The year was 1995. Bill Clinton was in the White House. The Atlanta Braves won their first World Series in almost thirty years. And a jury took less than four hours to acquit O. J. Simpson for a double murder charge. While not national news at the time, that was also the year when firefighter Donald Herbert sustained severe brain damage.
Four days after Christmas, an early morning blaze ravaged a two-story apartment building in the snow-covered town of Buffalo, New York. Donald, a thirty-four-year-old rescue squad veteran, cited numerous times for bravery, strapped on his breathing mask and attacked the flames in hopes of finding any survivors. This time, however, the building fought back, dropping its roof on the rescue effort. Trapped in the attic by fiery debris, knocked unconscious by falling timbers, and deprived of oxygen for six minutes, Donald slipped into a coma for several months. He was later diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state.3 Unable to feed himself, walk, or talk, Donald was restricted to his bed or a wheelchair. Buffalo firefighters banded together to support his family with chores and financial support. And, they took turns visiting their unresponsive colleague for years on end. While those efforts appeared to be fruitless, his wife, family, and friends continued to lavish love on him.
For the better part of ten years, Donald remained speechless and noncommunicative and resided in a nursing care facility. His wife, Linda, however, was the one who became speechless after the nursing staff called one day to inform her that Donald suddenly ‘‘woke up.’’ His first words were, ‘‘I want to talk to my wife.’’4 Linda and his four sons rushed to the nursing home and, for a marathon fourteen hours of hugs and conversation, got reacquainted. After all, Donald’s youngest son Nicholas, thirteen, was a toddler at the time of the accident.
Donald Herbert spent nearly a year reconnecting with his family. And though the initial fourteen hours with his family were his most lucid, he was able to communicate with them and get reacquainted. Sadly, he passed away in February 2006 after a battle with pneumonia. Was his life worth saving? Just ask his wife and children, who had the precious gift of spending nearly a full year with their husband and dad.
When asked to comment about Donald Herbert’s amazing recovery by WebMD, neurologist
Nancy Childs, who works at the Texas Neuro-Rehab Center in Austin, Texas, admitted that scientists know ‘‘practically nothing’’ about the inner processes of the human brain in an injury case like this. She said, ‘‘Some of the basic science and basic questions about what happens with the neurophysiology of the brain as patients move through levels of consciousness are just beginning to be explored.’’5 In other words, even highly specialized scientists and neurologists are still learning about the way the brain operates.
Just ask Donald Herbert’s family, after his long-dormant tongue was loosened after ten years of nonuse.
Or ask Tracy Gaskill.
On September 3, 2002, Tracy’s pickup truck rolled over on a Kansas highway causing extreme trauma to her head and neck. Taken by helicopter to the emergency room at a Wichita hospital, she was placed on a ventilator. The injuries to her brain were so severe, doctors informed the family that she’d be lucky to survive the night. They were wrong. Tracy pulled through, and though semicomatose and unable to speak or feed herself in the years following, she began to heal.
About two and a half years after suffering brain damage, the non-communicative Tracy stunned her doctors and family by suddenly speaking. Her doctor, David Schmeidler, said, ‘‘I have never seen this happen in my career. I’ve read about it happening, the severely brain damaged recovering suddenly, but never seen it until now.’’6
Dr. Schmeidler didn’t miss the parallel to Terri Schiavo’s case. He said Tracy ‘‘is actually able to speak and to speak coherently. In light of all this stuff on Terri Schiavo, it makes you pause and think. For three years or so, [Tracy] was fed through a tube, then she swallowed a little bit and now she speaks.’’7 In fact, she’s rediscovered the pleasure of strawberry shakes from Sonic.
Tracy’s doctor believes four things contributed to her unexplainable return from death’s door: constant medical care, prayer, speech therapy, and the daily visits from her grandparents. Tracy’s mother had died prior to her accident, and her father lived in a different city. But grandparents Don and Stella Gaskill made Tracy their top priority. I can only imagine what would have happened if Terri had been permitted the same level of medical care and speech therapy afforded to Tracy.