Terri Schiavo isn't the only one who's brain-dead

Let's talk about pro-lifers and Terri Schiavo. In case you live under a rock or think that the news is Satan, you'll remember she's the clinically brain-dead woman whose husband wanted to let her die and whose parents insisted she be kept on life support.

This case brought out the pro-life, every life is sacred, God loves life crowd. They spent months arguing that God demands we keep everyone alive. Letting Terri die would be a crime against God, Terri, and America. Apparently even letting a brain-dead woman die is an issue of patriotism. Essentially it was mass hysteria and making a medical decision tantamount to religious sin.

Here's the problem. The pro-lifers immediately assumed that God wanted Terri to live. But without very expensive, very sophisticated technology, she would die. In fact, in the most natural sense (no machines, no science, just Terri and God) Terri would have died months before she did. So it was a combination of biology, engineering, and chemistry that even allowed us the opportunity to keep her alive. In any previous era, she would have died and people would have said "God wanted it that way". Now that our science has progressed to a point that we can keep her alive (even if we don't know if she'll ever function again), apparently God says "let there be life". The point is that she was, without the technology, doomed to death. Millions of brain-dead people have died in the history of the human race. One more won't bring down the wrath of God. In fact, by your own argument, God wanted them to be brain-dead and die. Why would Terri be any different?

Of course, you can always argue that "God gave us the knowledge and equipment to keep her alive, therefore we should". This is an unprovable, untestable, and specious argument. In the end, Terri died because she was in a state that, without constant time, energy, and technological intervention, is ALWAYS fatal. Seems to me God really wanted her dead and we just kind of prolonged the process. We can argue about the sacredness of life or whether being a vegetable constitutes being alive all day long. That's a fine thing to discuss. But saying "God wants everyone to live" is a poor reason to keep a brain-dead woman on life support.

On top of all that, I would hazard to guess that most people can't afford that kind of treatment. Most types of insurance have lifetime caps. And when the money runs out in a hospital, so does your life support. So I would say that in many cases, even if people wanted to keep loved ones alive, they simply do not have access to the resources (monetary and otherwise) necessary to do so. Are all of these people sinners because of circumstance? No. And stop making it sound like they are. Go back to your magical book and your other crusades and leave the medical decisions to people who've spent their lives dedicated to its art and practice.