Sunday, October 14, 2007

"Back Off!" Don't Sign Your Life Away

Charlotte F. Allen writes in a Washington Post column today based on personal experience on how the culture of death is pressing 'living wills' as means of devaluing a lives of vulnerable persons.
Furthermore, I found something weasely in the way all those options were presented, as though my only real choice were between being dispatched into the hereafter at the first sign of loss of consciousness or being stuck with as many tubes as needles in a voodoo doll and imprisoned inside a ventilator until global warming melts the ice caps and the hospital washes out to sea. I found the box on the form that said "I decline a living will" and checked it. Right now, my husband is my living will, and after we spent 13 days observing Terri Schiavo exercise her "right to die" by being slowly dehydrated to death after her feeding tube was removed in 2005, he knows exactly how I feel about such matters.

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