Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!yale!bunker!wtm From: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) Newsgroups: misc.handicap Subject: Miniapolis Man Fights Nazi Doctors To Keep His Wife Alive Message-ID: <15999@handicap.news> Date: 6 Jun 91 15:40:58 GMT Sender: wtm@bunker.isc-br.com Reply-To: covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) Organization: Covici Computer Systems Lines: 112 Approved: wtm@hnews.fidonet.org Fidonet: Split Index Number: 15999 MINNEAPOLIS MAN VOWS TO FIGHT NAZI DOCTORS TO KEEP HIS WIFE ALIVE by Linda Everett U.S. Club of Life May 30 (EIRNS)--In an attempt to set a precedent for medical fascism, the Hennepin County (Minn.) Board of Commissioners has authorized a Minneapolis public hospital to sue for the ``right'' to kill a patient against her stated wishes and those of her family. The Hennepin County Medical Center petitioned Probate Court Judge Patricia L. Lebois this week to have Oliver Wanglie removed as legal guardian to his wife of 53 years, who is now severely brain-damaged, and appoint someone more amenable to the Medical Center's goal of removing 87-year-old Helga Wanglie's life-support. Lebois is expected to hand down a decision within weeks. Put bluntly, this means your right to believe in the sanctity of human life, your right to the medical treatment that sustains that life, and your right to society's protection of that life--all went on trial this week in Minneapolis. - `Until the Lord Calls Her' - Oliver Wanglie knows what's at stake. He testified today that, when doctors demanded his wife's ventilator be removed, he told them that ``There are thousands of doctors killing babies in the womb at the beginning of life, and some are killing people at the end of life, as Hitler did to the elderly. History teaches that a nation without a high moral standard has crumbled to dust.'' He would never, he told the court, remove his wife's ventilator--even with a court order. Helga, he said, was a devout Lutheran who had said she wanted to stay here ``until the Lord called her.'' Helga Wanglie entered Hennepin County Medical Center with a fractured hip in late 1989. For five months she was conscious, on a ventilator because of breathing problems. Doctors insisted she be moved to Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul, where, despite the fact that she was a difficult respiratory patient, her ventilator was removed. She was found unconscious and rushed to another hospital, because Bethesda lacked the capability to revive her. By the time she was resuscitated, she had sustained severe brain damage. When she was returned to Hennepin County, doctors repeatedly asked--and then, last December, threatened--to disconnect her ventilator. Although all her hospital bills are reportedly being paid, hospital officials demanded the right to stop her life-support because keeping her alive on life-support is ``futile care'' that ``is not in the patient's interests.'' Oliver Wanglie and his two adult children adamantly refused. Because Wanglie never wavered from the strength of his--and his wife's--conviction that ``Only He Who gave life has the right to take life,'' hospital officials tried in court to portray Wanglie as ``senile,'' saying he always veered off on ``tangents'' involving his worldview and was unable to focus on his wife's condition. The fact is that during two hours of cross-examination today, Wanglie, who is licensed to practice law in three states, recited his wife's complete medical history from memory and corrected officials on incorrect dates and records. As for Wanglie's ``worldview''--at least {he,} unlike his adversaries, recognizes Nazi euthanasia when he sees it. - Hitler's `Ethic' - Two precedents are involved here. Economic Malthusians and euthanasia advocates want the courts to: 1) recognize a hospital's authority to eliminate what they call ``futile care'' which sustains anyone whose life, they allege, is not worth living (a term coined by Adolf Hitler in his euthanasia program); 2) legitimize the movement to kill outright all levels of severely brain-damaged patients, whether they are labeled comatose, ``permanently unconscious,'' or in a so-called persistent-vegetative state. It is significant that Hennepin County Medical Center is home to the notorious pro-death neurologist Ronald Cranford, who has proposed that the courts begin the debate to determine if patients like Helga Wanglie should even be considered ``persons.'' If they are not conscious, he says, they lack personhood, and thus, do not have the protection of civil or constitutional rights. Cranford has organized medical ethics committees throughout the country, as well as in Hennepin itself. It is not at surprising, then, that the hospital's ethics consultant, Steven H. Miles, says people like Helga Wanglie don't have the right to ``inappropriate''--that is, life-sustaining--care. The type of ethics promoted here don't exactly quote Hitler's view that the chronically ill are a plague to be expunged from society--but they come close. With Hitler, Cranford et al. consider people like Helga Wanglie to be {not human--} ``non-persons,'' the killing of whom is not murder. The supposed ``alarm'' that medical ethicists are displaying around this case, because it denies ``patient autonomy'' (that darling of all right-to-die precedents), is totally bogus. The entire field of medical ethics, so-called, is built on the destruction of the principle of the sanctity of life. Saving and sustaining human life becomes ``debatable'' only after that principle has been erased from the medical profession's sense of purpose. >From New Federalist V5, #21. John Covici covici@ccs.covici.com