Shades of Terri Schiavo. Politicians are again rushing to capitalize on the awful dilemmas facing families with hopeless medical cases. Medical training not required. See Mike Huckabee (Opposing views) and the case of 13-year-old Jahi McMath of Oakland, Calif.:
According to RawStory.com, Huckabee admitted on his Saturday show that he was not medically trained, but encouraged McMath’s family to keep her on life support and not to allow doctors to decide if their child is dead (video below).
“Every life has value and worth,” said Huckabee. “There is no such person who is disposable, one whose life has been deemed by others to be less than others and therefore expendable, I can’t share that.”
However, doctors never deemed McMath’s life to be “less” valuable than anyone else’s life. They deemed her clinically brain dead, which is a medical condition, not an ethical pronouncement, but that’s exactly what Huckabee deemed it to be.
“The road that starts that way in deciding that some lives have less value and are unworthy of protection, that leads to a culture that tolerates the undeserved killing of over 55 million unborn children in this country,” added Huckabee. “It leads to China’s birth policy that limits the number of children for a family and enforces forced abortion if they deviate from the state-determined ideal.”
“It’s also that culture that allowed the Nazis to to hideously justify the savage slaughter of millions of Jews, disabled people, old people and those with mental illness,” Huckabee continued. “Let’s hope and pray that the courts continue to do what every court should do, respect parents over government, family over hospitals and, above all, protect Jahi from them all.”
As the Schiavo case once proved, it is not a big step from politicians expressing their judgments about medicine to government action taking decisions away from doctors and families.