Value Your Medical Autonomy

[sandnsea]

Note to Ron Reagan, and all liberals who are not Democrats, you COULD be talking about this.

Foxnews reports 61% of poll respondents would not want to live in a vegetative state, ABCNews reports 87%; and similar numbers support the spouse making the final decision. Salon asks today why the media is ignoring these polls and the opinion of the public. Good question.

But there is some hope in those poll numbers. Despite all the hype and media attention, despite the million-dollar Christian Theocrat’s media campaign, despite lies being told on every cable program, despite the intervention of the run-away Congress; the people were still able to cut through to the heart of this issue and make up their own mind.

The American people are usually able to make up their own mind, outside the hyperbole of a Presidential election, and that is what the Terri Schiavo case is all about. It is also what the Baby Sun case was about, and is what the case of this Navy wife is about. It is still unbelievable to me that this Navy wife would have been forced to carry this pregnancy in some quarters, only to have the decision of life and death of her infant handed over to a hospital afterwards.

“When she learned that she was carrying a baby with almost no brain and no chance of survival, a devastated young Navy wife from Everett pleaded with a federal court in Seattle to force her military medical program to pay for an abortion.

"I could not imagine going through five more months of pregnancy, knowing that the baby will never survive or have any kind of life whatsoever," the woman, then 19, told a federal judge in August 2002. "I understand that even if the baby is born alive, it will probably die after it takes a few breaths. I am really terrified of the prospect of giving birth, then watching the baby die."

She won her case and had the abortion. But more than two years later, the federal government continues to fight her, trying to get the woman and her sailor husband to pay back the $3,000 the procedure cost and trying to cast in stone a ban on government-funded abortions.”

I am not as interested in why the media is ignoring the poll numbers as I am in why the media is ignoring the issue of people having the freedom to make their own medical decisions. It is only when the right of the individual and their next-of-kin are respected in these decisions that we can be assured money or the whims of moralists won’t dictate these decisions in the future.

http://www.lightupthedarkness.org/blog/default.asp?view=plink&id=610

[sandnsea]

1. This is important

Medical Autonomy in all medical decisions. For the individual and the next of kin. There are other cases that the media should be covering in addition to Schiavo, we ought to try to get them to do that. This will affect every one of us at some point in time.