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.

The daughters and I have a routine that works pretty well. I still wash their laundry, because I hate to run partial loads, which is what would happen if everyone’s wash were done separately. So, instead, I have them fold their own. We do it all together in my bedroom while we watch shows we’ve recorded off Discovery Health Channel (or sometimes HGTV, if we’re so inclined). So we’re watching one with this woman who’s got all these unrelated symptoms, the doctors can’t figure it out, they treat her for the various things they think it might be. They finally figure out what it is, and all the other things they did helped her survive long enough for them to treat the thing it actually was, and once they’re pretty sure that if anything is going to help her get better, they’ve done it, so now it’s a waiting game to see if she comes out of her coma. The family, meanwhile, is praying and making deals with god. You know, if you make her better, I promise I’ll do this or that. So the mom prays and prays and prays. She says to her husband that she asked god to give her a sign that the woman would survive. So the doctors, having done all they could and cleaned the woman up some, let the parents in to see her. She leans over her daughter and talks to her, and asks her to please open her eyes. Hallelujah! She opens her eyes! The mother is all over the goddidit thing, crediting her prayers with the healing of her daughter. Ummmm. . .the doctors gave her fluids, drugs, dialysis, put her in a medically induced coma to slow the spread of whatever it was, ran test after test after test until they found out what her problem was, and then gave her the treatment for that problem. The mother could have prayed until she turned blue, and it wouldn’t have made a difference. In fact, if she really wanted to see the power of prayer, she could have left the daughter at home instead of letting her go to the hospital, and see how well that worked. I feel bad for the doctors, putting in all that time and effort, years in school, internship, and residency, working crazy hours and doing even more time and research each time a problematic patient comes in, only to have all of that yanked out from under them, reduced to irrelevancy each time the credit for success goes to an invisible guy in the sky.

So we’re folding laundry and watching this, and I start yelling at the TV. The girls got an earful, but I think they’ve gotten used to it, because they just laughed. What a way to bond with your kids, eh?

I got this e-mail that really ticked me off, one of those Coulteresque sweeping condemnation type of things. It was titled “20 ways to be a good liberal” and each one was enough of a fallacy that I decided to write individual blog posts addressing each one. (Edit: hubby tells me this is a really old piece, but obviously it’s still getting sent, so it still irritates me.) So, here’s the first:

1. You have to be against capital punishment, but support abortion on
demand.

And isn’t it bizarre that the good neocons are so supportive of capital punishment, even if it means the execution of an innocent person, but regard unwanted babies as a good thing? GWB and his brother have been responsible for the executions of a huge number of people, and among those executed and those awaiting execution have been a number of innocent people – I have the number 40 in my head for some reason, but that could have been a state figure or a year or a total altogether, or it could be completely wrong. And heck, we have Ann Coulter saying just this week that the problem with the genocide in Darfur is that they’re not killing people fast enough (and, later, that we should be wiping out the population of Iraq with greater alacrity as well.) In my good liberal mind, the execution of a living, feeling, grown human being who is important to other human beings is not something that should be undertaken lightly; the execution of said human being when he or she is innocent of the crime for which he or she is executed is inexcusable. Be it 40, or 400, or 4 executions of innocent citizens, it is too many to justify continued use of the death penalty. What surprises me is that even if this argument falls on deaf neocon ears, why the financial one doesn’t make an impact, either. A prisoner who is condemned to death has the right to appeal unlimited times until his sentence is carried out, while a person sentenced to life may have conditions attached to the sentence that prohibit or limit appeals, ensure no early release, or set conditions for release that limit appeals. As expensive as it is to keep a prisoner in custody, it’s nothing compared to the cost of his multiple appeals. From a purely economic standpoint, the death penalty is prohibitively expensive. For a neocon, that money could be spent on something else. For a liberal like me, it could be not spent at all.

But it will be spent, and we all know it. If our mewling little liberal voices weren’t heard, it would probably end up going towards more prisons. You see, we can look at the crowded prisons, the huge numbers of unemployed and working poor, the people who are hungry, in need of clothing and shelter, the sick who have no insurance or money for medical care, and the children growing up in dangerous places without the education that will lift them out and see a few things that neocons apparently cannot. First, we see people suffering, and want to see them helped. Second, we see opportunities for social programs for people that are being cut, while funding for war, pet line item spending, and corporate welfare and favoritism not only get more money, but receive no public scrutiny. Third, we see that women in these situations, given no opportunity but to give birth, bring more children into these same situations. It’s a nice little sound bite that you may be aborting the next Einstein, but the truth of the matter is that Einstein was not unwanted by his mother, brought up in filthy, dangerous conditions, given a second-rate education, or been tempted into criminal activity. Had he been born to a poor black mother in Camden, who couldn’t get an abortion when she wanted one, we wouldn’t have Einstein, or at least we wouldn’t have him as an example of something to aspire to. In other words, we sniveling liberals look beyond that fetus and see a human being, one who would be stuck in a life anywhere from less than ideal to completely miserable, but a human being who starts life with the disadvantage of being unwanted by the person who should care for him the most. The fetus that is aborted early has no nervous system – no sensations of any pain, physical, mental, or emotional. After he is born, though, not only can he feel these pains, but he can spread them around, even to those he loves. So I think we can have a corrolary to this first point: “20 ways to be a good Neocon: 1. You have to oppose abortion, but eliminate all social programs that will help the children after they are born. 1a. You have to be opposed to killing innocent babies, but not worry about killing innocent adults by mistake.” Sound about right?