Supreme Court to Terri: Drop Dead

Refused to grant an emergency stay of the order to remove her feeding tube in order to allow time for the outcome of an appeal.

And I'm not fond of slippery slope arguments as a rule (I mean, once we begin taking slippery slope arguments seriously, who knows what sort of arguments we'll begin taking seriously in the future?), but Rightwing Nuthouse notes that the right-to-die/right-to-euthanize impulse seems to be gaining. As he puts it:

Each time we kill someone like Terri it gets easier. Each time we make a decision to end the life of someone like Terri we expand the boundries of what’s “permissable.� Each time the debate is joined, the advocates for the cult of death point out the “special nature of this particular case� or that it’s only an “isolated incident."

And to prove his point, he cites the Gronigen Protocols, Dutch procedures regarding when it's ethical to euthanize children with incurable and painful diseases, up to 12 years old.

I don't believe these are easy questions that can always be resolved in favor of "life." But we do seem to galloping towards a general acceptance of euthanasia in the interests of "mercy" for a stricken patient -- and in the unspoken interests of convenience for every one else.

posted by Ace at 03:49 PM

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