This is the 17 month old boy who’s being kept alive by machines in Austin, TX. A judge, on Tuesday, decided that he should be kept alive for 10 more days, overriding the doctors’ decision that continued life support was futile. I was doing a search on this, and there are plenty of people out there insisting that the doctors can’t really diagnose the disease (although they can say that Emilio cannot breathe, eat, see, hear, or think. . .) and that the doctors are only trying to stop life support because Emilio is a Medicaid patient (It’s a hospital, they can’t do that, legally. Honest.) The truth of the matter is that if the doctors hadn’t intervened and hooked him up to machines to keep him alive until they found out what was wrong, he’d already be gone. Peacefully, as opposed to being full of tubes and needles, an empty shell of flesh. Both sides, the one who want to turn off the machines, and the ones who want to keep them going, agree that Emilio will continue to live only with machines breathing for him and tubes pumping fluids and nutrition into him. This is not a question that the child might ever recover or regain any quality of life. He will not. But it makes his mother happy that he’s still alive, and that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Grrr. So today in an AP article, she says that thing that always pisses me off in these matters. . .”He may not live that long, but that’s nobody’s choice. That’s my choice. And that’s God’s choice.” Mrs. Gonzalez, if there were a God, his choice was already made, and the doctors intervened, going against his will. And then you stepped in and took measures to further contradict his will. If you really, truly believed that there’s a God, and his will must be obeyed, you wouldn’t have even brought your son to the hospital. It was YOUR will to bring him to the hospital. It was YOUR will to allow him to be hooked up to machines. It was YOUR will to keep him hooked up to machines when the doctors told you his diagnosis. It was YOUR will to get a judge to prolong the treatment despite the assuredness of your son’s inability to survive his condition. Don’t bring God into it as if you have some sort of hotline to heaven and he told you what to do. “Well, Caterina, I gave him this genetic condition that would kill him, and it was all settled, but then I decided that what I was really doing was testing your faith by seeing how hard you’d fight to keep him alive no matter how much he suffered. Yep. I meant to do that.” Cut me a break.

Now look, I understand how much you can love your child. I have two of my own, and I’d do just about anything for them. But if anything ever happened to them that left them nothing but empty, broken bodies, I would never elect to prolong that. If there were hope of recovery, I’d cling to that hope as long as it was there, but when all treatment does is prolong the dying, I would regard it as selfish and immoral to continue that treatment. I would hope that others would do the same for me. In fact, I would hope that one day it will be legal to administer medications to end life humanely. In cases where a patient’s death is inevitable, but will be caused by suffocation or starvation or painful progression of terminal illness of any kind, it should be an option. Not an over-the-counter option, easily obtained, but available when doctors have reached a consensus and the patient and/or the patient’s family agree. You see, science has reached a point where it’s possible to cure a lot of things, fix a lot of things, or keep people alive who might have died. It’s not the will of any supernatural being when a drug is administered, an operation is performed, or a machine substitutes for the work of a bodily organ. Science has also reached a point where it can reliably predict, in most cases, whether a patient will live and, in fact, whether the patient actually IS alive or simply being sustained by machinery. Nowhere in any religious text does it say that any supernatural being wants people to be kept alive as long as possible by machines, and nowhere does it say that any gods approve of medical intervention. So I’m just asking for a little honesty here. If you use science to cure a disease, don’t give credit to god for the recovery. If you use science to heal an injury, don’t thank god for making you better. And if you use science to keep a body alive, don’t say it’s god’s will that that person is still alive. I don’t think that’s too unreasonable.