No Voice? No Rights!

I have noticed a pattern of late: if you don’t have the ability to communicate your feelings, you are either a) not a human being or b) a dispensable one.

Terri Schaivo is brain damaged, but she is not brain dead. If it is indeed her wish to be starved and dehydrated to death over a 2 to 4 weeks period, fine. But as far as I can tell, the evidence presented does not absolutely support the claim that it is Schaivo’s wish to die: a) this way (i.e. via starvation) or b) after a feeding tube (and not life support) was inserted when she is still conscience (i.e. not brain dead). And all the while this campaign is run by the husband who has 2 kids with another woman… that’s nice. And despite testimony by survivors who came out of such “vegetative” state with the help of rehabilitation testifying that they could hear, see, and feel everything in such a state, it’s somehow less heinous and ok to starve a woman who can’t tell us the pain that she is going through (A woman who recovered stated that she felt the pain of surgery. The doctors did not provide her with anesthetics). And is it just my misunderstanding, or are they starving her to death knowing full well the possibility of her capability to feel thirst, hunger, and pain when her wish to die is still being debated?

Another group of people that apparently have no rights whatsoever are “fetuses”. When it’s a zygote, I’ll agree, I call that a zygote, not a baby. But when it is 6 months old, viable outside of the womb, can hear sounds outside of the womb and can suck it’s thumb, that’s a B-A-B-Y. And as hard as it is for some to understand, babies are actually, human! They are not dogs, not cats, not monkeys, and certainly not just a ball of cells and organisms that can feel no pain. And that’s why it’s so hard for me to understand how people can support partial birth abortions. As we all know, partial birth abortion uses the D & X procedure which pulls the baby out by the feet, stabs the baby in the back of the head to suck out her brain and then pull her out fully to discard. I guess as long as any part of the baby is still in the womb, the baby is not a human being and sucking out her brain is a perfectly ok thing to do. I do hope that I’d live to see the day when people look back at the practice of partial birth abortion like we look back at the Romans who created the games in the Coliseum.

But why stop at people who can’t communicate? If we can create a chart of “human being valuability index”, we’ll have a clear sense every time of an individual’s value, thereby making terminating someone a quicker process (none of this court battle nonsense). So shall we start from fully functioning limbs? For every limb that looses it’s function, we’ll give it a -1, but just to be fair, we’ll give it a -1/2 to disabled people that are at least useful to us like Stephen Hawking. What about non-physicist types? Well they just had better watch out! But who really cares at the end of the day? They are less than fully human anyway.