Bobby Schindler has a column in today’s Washington Times entitled “False Compassion.” He writes about some notable food and fluids cases past and present in an overall piece against dehydrating people with cognitively impairments. He concludes strongly: Make no mistake: thousands of conscious and unconscious persons die by deliberate dehydration every year. We only hear of the cases in which there is family disagreement. Believe me when I tell you that death by dehydration is something that no family member should ever have to witness. It is cruel and barbaric and takes days and often weeks to play itself out, torturing not only the patient but all who love them as well.
I watched my own sister anguish through 13 days without food or water and there are no words that can properly describe this inhumanity. At the end, blood appeared in her eyes because her tissues were cracking from a loss of moisture.
Tragically, killing the cognitively disabled by taking away their food and water is about as common in our nation as it is for our politicians to abandon this issue. And for reasons I still struggle to understand, deliberately dehydrating persons with brain injuries really doesn’t seem to catch the ire of most Americans, certainly not those in the media. If you did the same thing to a dog, you would rightly join Michael Vick in jail for animal abuse.
Persons with disabilities, no matter how serious, are just that—persons. They should be treated as our most precious treasures reflecting who we should be as a nation—not as damaged goods to be discarded when they outlive their “usefulness”—which, sadly, says more about our growing moral bankruptcy than it does about their intrinsic value or human worth.
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