Dead Tissue is Not a Dead Issue in Oakland and North Texas

Good news, right-to-lifers.  That brain-dead girl from Oakland, Jahi McMath, had surgery the other day to insert a ventilator and feeding tubes at the secret facility where she's been flown (at an estimated cost of $55,000) to get her away from Children's Hospital in Oakland.  The heartless doctors at Children's Hospital, if you will recall, didn't want to feed her or keep her hooked up to a ventilator any more simply because she's been brain dead-- with a death certificate from the coroner and everything-- since December 12.  But now, thanks to an activist lawyer, and an ethics-less "healthcare" facility, and a clueless, spineless judge, this deceased individual can continue to take up space (at great expense to somebody, probably you and me-- does Obamacare cover "after the end of life care" too?) until she literally rots-- which process, thankfully, seems already to have begun.

Brain-dead is not like a coma, ala Terry Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan.  It's dead.  There isn't going to be a miraculous recovery.  A ventilator pumps oxygen into the lungs of the teenage corpse, the chest rises and falls, and in response to the oxygen the heart mechanically beats.  Meantime, what's left of the brain gradually liquifies. The "nutrition" that's pumped doesn't get digested.  And eventually the erstwhile young person starts to stink.

Meanwhile, in the anti-Darwinian, anti-Jeffersonian, pro-life State of Texas, another dead woman, Marlise Munoz, is on life support.  Apparently, the Texas State Legislature has decided that you can't remove life support from anyone who's been diagnosed as "pregnant," even if they're brain dead.  So, despite the clear deadness of the individual in question, and the unequivocal instructions from the next of kin to unhook the patient and let her fly up to Heaven to join Karen Ann and the others, another ventilator is pumping, other feeding tubes are dripping, deep in the heart of Texas.

What's wrong with this picture?  I've got news for you, folks-- whether one is alive or not is not a matter of opinion.  This is not the Dark Ages, and any medical professional knows that when the brain is dead, the person is dead and should be gone.  But what difference do science and logic make in the face of political or religious dogmatism?

Because that's the problem at bottom:  crazy religious "faith" coupled with abysmal ignorance, craven political cowardice, and a complete lack of ethics-- all laced with a liberal dose of cowardice on the part of those who should know better-- adds up to a travesty.  And let's not forget our culture's irrational fear of death.

The teenager's parents say that they believe their dead little girl is alive because it looks like she's breathing and she "still feels warm."  They believe that God is going to bring her back to them.  How do you deal with an argument like that from uneducated people who never got a degree but do go to church?  Well, you could tell them that if God is all-powerful and really wants their little girl to live, he don't need no stinkin' ventilator.  You could even tell them that it's blasphemous for them to assume that the ventilator and the feeding tubes are somehow necessary for their dead child's ressurection.  Maybe that would work.  As for the family of the victim in Texas, you could tell them to stop voting Republican and maybe something like what's happening to the dead woman there won't happen again.

The real problem isn't the "ordinary people" involved in these cases, anyway.  It's people like the brain-dead judge who issued injunctions to keep a dead teenager on a ventilator after the coroner had declared her "completely and sincerely dead," which is good enough to end the matter, even in Munchkinland.  At best the judge is a coward, and has no business being in his job.

The problem is people like the opportunistic, politically motivated lawyer who took the Oakland teenager's case to start with.  Wait, though, I'm not being fair.  Apparently he's motivated by money, too, because he's announced plans to sue Children's Hospital for its violation of the "religious freedom" and "privacy rights" of the dead teenager's family.  (Apparently, there are no plans for a "wrongful death" lawsuit yet... can you guess why?)

The problem is people like the ones who run the secret, undisclosed location where the little dead girl is currently being stored, and whomever (presumably a doctor, but who knows?) who reportedly performed surgeries to insert a ventilator and feeding tubes into the corpse to keep it "feeling warm" for a while longer.

The problem is the Texas State Legislature, who passed the crazy laws at issue there, and the fundamentalist wackadoos who fund their election and re-election and re-re-election campaigns.  The problem is the legislators and school board members around the country who want to purge the history books of inconvenient figures like Thomas Jefferson and cram the science books with crap like "Creation Science," without whom none of the above would have been possible, thank you very much.

And of course the problem is with the hypocritical proponents of medieval religion who can't even get the "omnipotent" thing right.  Hey, guys, I read your Book.  It says that Jesus can raise the dead, but it says nothing about Him needing ventilators or feeding tubes to do it. 

Death happens, and it happens to everybody-- unlike education, which apparently is in short supply.  Unless we want to slide back into the Dark Ages, we'd better start confronting this craziness, don't you think?