A bit of good news for once

See here for a happy update to my last post on Vincent Lambert. Kudos to the Committee to Support Vincent Lambert and their on-going work to monitor the situation. Hopefully he will now be transferred to a better facility, but that has yet to be set up.

Je suis Vincent. Je soutiens Vincent.

I have been rather disappointed with the pro-life blogosphere regarding its failure to cover the Vincent Lambert case with any consistency. At this point one has to read a hard-to-find French-language site (for which I rely on Google Translate) to get regular updates. I have great admiration for Wesley J. Smith but gave him some pushback on the lack of coverage of this case in my comments here , here, and here.

If nothing else, the Vincent Lambert case appears to represent a sea change in France, legally, and someone with better connections than mine could do a better report than I can on exactly what the legal situation has previously been and what the precedent of saying that Vincent is killable will mean in the future for vulnerable patients in France. Will this vary by geographical region? Will there be many doctors who will resist? Where are most of the French people on the issue of dehydrating people to death? What ability will families have to protect their family members? What is the precise nature of the new legislation that was passed in France recently on this issue? And so forth.

In any event, let's be clear: Vincent Lambert is not dead yet. This is why the fact that his case has been dropped bothers me. It's as though he's being treated as dead already, because it's allegedly a hopeless case, and the outcome is inevitable.

As with Terri Schiavo, Vincent is alive today because his parents have not taken that attitude and have gone on fighting legally for his life for years.

Yes, I know we're all weary, and yes, I know, there is little we can do. But let's face it: To some degree this is a failure of pro-life solidarity across cultural and geographical boundaries. If this were happening in America, various sites would be re-publishing and re-tweeting updates on Vincent's legal situation and on the next moves against him and for him, in English, all over the world. As it is, just try googling to get the latest and see what luck you have. Yeah, not much, right?

For some reason, the main site that is the clearing house for updates from Vincent's supporters isn't coming up in my google searches.

So, if you're interested (and you should be), HERE IT IS.

And HERE is a link to the updates page.

Be sure to sign the petition for Vincent Lambert's life. That will also sign you up for updates via e-mail (though they'll be in French).

As near as I can understand, a couple of relevant points are these:

--Vincent can apparently eat by mouth. This should be a really big deal, but his doctors aren't paying attention to it.

--Vincent's fate appears to lie in the hands of his doctors. Unlike in the Schiavo case, there is not a direct court order telling the doctors to kill him. So if they were to relent (a big if), and especially if they were to allow him to be transferred to a facility in a different country with a different agenda, he could be saved.

So what can we do? Continue to publicize the case. Sign the petition. And pray. Those come to mind immediately.

The latest appears to be that a meeting has been called by the doctor in charge (if I'm understanding correctly) for July 23. Vincent's supporters fear that this will mean that the doctor will order his food and water to be stopped at that time.

Speaking for myself, I would love to do an interview with someone knowledgeable in the pro-life camp in France on the future of such cases. It is doubtful that I will get the opportunity, but that would be a great opportunity for independent journalism. I suggest that some pro-life organizations look into that.

The wrong Mr. Spock

Old Star Trek fans will remember the episode "Mirror Mirror," in which some members of the Enterprise crew end up switched with their evil counterparts in a parallel universe. Mr. Spock is one of the switched characters. His counterpart is just as smart as the Mr. Spock we all know and (sort of) love, but this Alternate Spock uses his intellectual gifts in an amoral way to achieve wicked ends. Naturally, in the end, the real Kirk suggests to the evil Spock that the system of assassination and intrigue in his world is illogical.

Well, yes and no. Far be it from me to disparage logic. God is the source of all truth and reason, and true reason will lead us to God. However, there is such a thing as being merely consistent while starting with bad premises. If, in that case, one regards it as a virtue of logic (a false kind of logic) to refuse to admit any reductio ad absurdam, to be consistent with the premises one started with to the bitter end, then one will be in one sense logical (i.e., consistent with one's original premises) but not therefore rational in the broader sense of conforming to true reason. For true reason can never contradict true goodness. But logic, very narrowly conceived, can be one tool in a toolkit, as used by fallen man, that leads one away from true goodness. In that case, one can become the wrong Mr. Spock.

Now, I'm going to launch out here into the realm of speculation, being sure to offend as many different types of people as possible in the process: There are certain corners of the blogosphere (if you haven't encountered them, count yourself lucky) in which misogyny lives on, partly as a reaction to feminism. One will sometimes see conjectures in these corners, or in (as it were) corners adjacent to them, to the effect that perhaps men are naturally more virtuous than women because men are more logical. If one has ever tried to discuss the humanity of the unborn child with a ditzy, hysterical, pro-abortion woman who refuses to stick to the point, one will have some understanding of where such a conjecture might come from. Those conversations can get really wearisome really fast.

I'm a complementarian and by no means a feminist, so I don't entirely mind discussing virtues and vices as "more masculine" or "more feminine," as long as those concepts are sufficiently qualified. E.g., Many individual women manifest "more masculine" virtues (such as being logical, sportsmanlike, and professional) and many individual men manifest "more feminine" vices (such as being illogical, whiny, and manipulative).

But as regards the question of whether being more logical leads one to be more virtuous, an interesting point arises: Just as there is a "more masculine" virtue of being highly logical, there is also a "more masculine" vice of turning oneself into the wrong Mr. Spock. The ability to turn off one's emotions and one's instinctive reactions has some utilitarian value. For example, a soldier has to be able to turn off his instinctive aversion to killing people. A surgeon has to be able to overcome any instinctive aversion to plunging a knife into someone. But sometimes one's emotions and instincts are deeply important clues to the meaning of the universe. The instinctive aversion to strangling a baby, for example, is part of the braking system that God has placed into mankind. It's the good part of human nature, a manifestation of the image of God in man. It is that part of the imago dei that pro-lifers access when they show either beautiful images of babies in the womb or shocking images of aborted children. When one says that that instinct is "mere emotion" and turns it off in response to a false "logic," one becomes Kermit Gosnell.

I conjecture that men are somewhat more likely than women to stifle their instinctive aversion to doing bad things by way of reasoning consistently from faulty premises. For example:

1) This being in the womb of this woman is not a person. (Because I studied personhood theory in ethics class, and there I learned that the fetus has not attained personhood.)

2) It is not always wrong to kill non-persons. In fact, non-persons can be killed for sufficient reasons of convenience as determined by persons.

Therefore,

3) It is not always wrong to kill this being in this woman's womb.

4) This woman is a person and has a sufficient reason for wanting to kill this non-person in her womb.

Therefore,

5) It is not wrong now to kill this non-person in this woman's womb.

6) I am a professional technician who can help this woman to kill this non-person without doing harm to her, the person.

Therefore,

7) It is not wrong for me to kill this fetus in this woman's womb.

And proceeds to carry out the procedure, however bloody, stifling all his horrors and qualms as simply something he needs to get over to be consistent with "logic."

Don't misunderstand me: There are plenty of women who go through this reasoning process as well. But I conjecture that this sort of false use of logic is somewhat more common among men, especially the sort who pride themselves on being logical (as does Mr. Spock).

Something similar is at work in the thinking of the ethicists that I discuss in this post. They argue that it is legitimate to dehydrate some people to death even if they are asking for water, because the patients lack "true capacity" to change their minds and ask for something they previously refused. As I pointed out in that post, this position is consistent with the ethicists' own premises regarding food and water, autonomy, and so forth. But that doesn't make it any less crazy. The ethicist who argues for dehydrating a woman to death even when she verbally asks for water has become the wrong Mr. Spock. A good dose of yuck factor and human compassion could cure the craziness and would be in an important sense more rational to follow than the argument they are using, but they have deliberately cut themselves off from that source.

What all of this means is that human nature is a many-orbed thing. God has given us various ways of getting access to moral truths, and we should not despise instinctive responses as simply unreliable as a guide to moral truth while elevating logical reasoning from given premises as simply reliable. At that point, it all comes down to the premises, doesn't it? What this means about men and women is that, if it's true that men are in general more logical and women in general more emotional, we are given to one another to complement one another, and this complementary value can sometimes carry over into the realm of morals, where we should each value the other's gifts. Women should value logic, and men, especially men who enter philosophy, should watch out for the danger of becoming the wrong Mr. Spock.

Ordinary care and "expensive" lives

I am not Catholic, but a recent conversation elsewhere has brought back to my mind the fact that the USCCB has implied that a means for preserving life may be "disproportionate" if it imposes "excessive expense."

Some people attempt to use this loophole to justify the murder (yep, I call it that) of helpless people like Terri Schiavo by depriving them of mere nutrition and hydration. The claim is that it is "excessively expensive" to "keep alive" someone like Terri.

My own strong preference would be for understanding ordinary and extraordinary care in biological terms, in terms of whether the body is actively dying, in terms of what everyone needs, and so forth, rather than in terms of expense. But it may be expected that the ordinary/extraordinary distinction will track the "very expensive/not-so-expensive" distinction, on the assumption that extraordinary care involves expensive technology.

People--especially Catholics--who want to excuse depriving the Terris of the world of mere food and water via a perceived "expense" loophole in the Church's teaching need to be brought up short by the following consideration: It is not the "artificial" nature of the nutrition and hydration that are the chief cause of expense for such helpless people. It is the fact that they live, are helpless, and need ordinary care: things like diaper changing, being turned in the bed, bathing, etc. This sort of care is what is most expensive, especially if the people closest to the helpless adult are unable because of strength considerations or unwilling to do that work.

Thought experiment: Suppose that a helpless, severely disabled adult like Terri were magically made able to survive without food and water but still needed day-to-day bodily care. Would the "expense" of her life be drastically decreased? I say that it would not. It's not the cost of the insertion of the PEG tube nor the cans of adult "formula" that are the heaviest expense. It's the fact that the person is alive and needs to be cared for as a baby would.

But so what? Question: Do we consider it "medical care" to bathe, clothe, change, and otherwise care for a baby? Do we consider such normal forms of care to be "extraordinary" or "disproportionate"?

The care of helpless adults is deemed "medical" because their being helpless means that something is wrong with them and also, practically, because it is so much more work to take care of them and is best done (though not necessarily done) by those with special training and a good deal of physical strength.

Once we realize that it is paradigmatically ordinary care that is so expensive for these people--"expensive," at least, in terms of time and effort, even if able to be undertaken by loving family--that it is simply their existence as helpless people that is expensive, I think we will realize that it is the merest sophistry to talk as if it is their "artificial" feeding that is "extraordinary" or "excessively expensive" and focus on that as an excuse for getting rid of them. One irony here is that tube feeding actually decreases the difficulty (and hence, the expense) of caring for a helpless person. It enables that person to get the necessary nutrition and hydration fairly easily, where spoon feeding would be much less efficient, enormously more time-consuming, probably would not provide adequate nutrition to an adult, and takes more skill to do safely.

The issue, then, is not that tube feeding is specially expensive, hence extraordinary, hence conveniently optional. The issue is that people who can't care for themselves need a lot of care.

But we knew that already. And if someone thinks that morally excuses dehydrating them to bring their expensive lives to a quicker end, he has a major problem.

(Warning to liberal trolls: I have a delete key, and I'm not afraid to use it.)

Australian quad given the "right" to be dehydrated to death

Story here. Unclear whether he'll actually do it. How evil is that? You insist that the courts declare you have this "right" when you aren't even sure you want it. On the principle of the thing. Presumably, so other people can be dehydrated to death. That's what they call progress, I guess. It's unclear from the story whether the facility has the right to refuse to be involved, but in any event, the facility appears to be willing in principle provided they can't be held liable. In the U.S., of course, nursing homes get court-ordered to withdraw nutrition and hydration. And dig the judge: Part of the argument for this is that he is not dying? I'm trying to wrap my mind around the pseudo-logic of that. I suppose the judge intends to emphasize that Rossiter is of sound mind. The Kevorkian from Down Under, Philip Nitschke, was on hand to say how terrible it is that Rossiter can't be killed more swiftly. All the usual suspects, in fact.

God have mercy on us.

HT Bill Luse, via e-mail

Schiavo case trial transcripts available on-line

I am blogging this in multiple places to bring it to the attention of the Google bots for searching researchers. My thanks to Zippy who has put it up on his blog.

I have just finished an article for the forthcoming issue of The Christendom Review on some legal aspects of the Terri Schiavo case. In the course of doing research for it, I managed (by dint of much and persistent e-mailing) to get hold of the trial transcripts of all the witness testimony in the Schiavo case. As far as I have been able to tell, these transcripts are not available elsewhere on-line.

Because people will be studying and discussing Terri Schiavo's death (murder, I would say) for many years to come, it seems to me extremely important that the witness testimony be available. The judge's job was to decide that there was "clear and convincing evidence" that Terri would have wanted to be dehydrated to death. Judge Greer's opinion is on-line here. (Greer's opinion, unlike the testimony transcripts, has been available on-line all along.)

Greer's opinion does not quote the witness testimony he is using. He just alludes to it, sometimes extremely vaguely, and sometimes even erroneously. News stories usually contain only bits and pieces, and their sources are unclear.

Greer dismissed Diane Meyer's testimony on the basis of his erroneous belief that Karen Ann Quinlan died before 1982. It is interesting to see how Meyer stands up to George Felos, the opposing attorney, who tries to put words into her mouth and confuse her. She did an especially good job given that Felos apparently succeeded in temporarily convincing everyone at Terri's trial that Quinlan actually died in 1976 when her ventilator was removed. In fact, she lived until 1985.

On my personal web page I now have

--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Diane Meyer
--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Scott Schiavo
--A PDF scan of the testimony transcript of Joan Schiavo
--A complete transcript of all the witness testimony, including the testimony of Michael Schiavo and Mrs. Schindler, in a web page html form.

These five were the witnesses who claimed to have had conversations with Terri about end-of-life issues.

I owe the Diane Meyer transcript directly to Pat Anderson, one of the Schindlers' lawyers. I owe the complete transcript to Atty. Joe Bell, who took a PDF that he had from Pat Anderson and made a careful project of translating it into searchable text.

My hope is that now when people search "Schiavo" and "trial transcripts," "Diane Meyer," and other such phrases, they will have more luck than I did in finding these important documents on-line.

Cross-posted

Looking up legal docs

Update: Document found. Thanks to Jonathan Prejean, who directed me to LEXIS/NEXIS. Yeah, I know: Why didn't I check that myself first. Well, see, I've never done it before, and... It took a bit of searching even there, but I now have the entire text. An interesting document. It looks to me like the 2DCA was very reluctant to say that her death was not "imminent," and that this was why they referred it to the Supreme Court as a question. There is even an urgent little bit at the end where they ask the Supreme Court to hurry up and hear the case lest (heaven forbid) the person in question should die with feeding and hydration in place while waiting for the courts to "assert her right of privacy." In fact, that's exactly what did happen in this case. But it does contain the "err on the side of life" direction, for what it is worth.

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(Original post)

Not being a lawyer, I refer the following question to my sage readership. How can I get a copy of the actual text of the following appellate court opinion from Florida?

In re Guardianship of Browning, 543 So.2d 258 (Fla. 2d DCA 1989)

I rather fancy myself a rad Googler, but I've googled 'n' googled, and what I've come up with is the Florida Supreme Court opinion by the same name from 1990, here, and a summary of the 2DCA appellate court's opinion, here. It's at least mildly interesting that the summary of the 2DCA opinion says that it held that "a guardian of a patient who is incompetent but not in a permanent vegetative state, and who suffers from an incurable but not necessarily terminal condition, cannot terminate life-sustaining treatment and feeding by tube." The Supreme Court decision by the same name holds just the opposite. In fact, it concludes that a person's death is "imminent" if that person's death will be imminent if food and hydration are removed. Cute, huh? So all of us are "imminently" dying. One would normally conclude that the Florida Supreme Court had simply overturned the 2DCA on this point, yet the Supreme Court's decision is worded rather as an answer to a "question" which the 2DCA has referred to it. In fact, there's no reference in the Supreme Court's opinion at all to the fact (if the summary article is right) that it is coming to the opposite conclusion to that of the appellate court on a fairly important point. Just to make things a little more interesting, the appellate opinion is often quoted as stating that a proxy must "err on the side of life" when trying to decide what a ward's wishes would be regarding treatment (where "treatment" includes, perversely, food and water), but the Supreme Court decision neither affirms nor rejects this instruction. It doesn't mention it at all.

All of this makes me curious to see the full text of the appellate court's decision. Since Google has failed me, I'd like to know what to try next. Esteemed husband has a pretty good interlibrary loan service here at Big State University, but there is (as far as I'm aware) not an actual law library. Does one simply take the reference for the opinion to ILL and say, "Here, find me a copy of this, please"? Or is there some other database one can sign into to see it if one's university subscribes?

This is all for an article I'm working on that will be a restrospective of some of the legal issues surrounding the murder of Terri Schiavo.

Thanks to all you legal eagles in my readership for info.