Posted by Damozel |
The best answer to certain hard questions is no answer. The only course of action when confronted with them is the painful exercise of one's best judgment or best guess. And so---amazingly---I find myself in complete agreement with Fred Thompson.
Thompson's stance on the right to die will appeal to civil libertarians, regardless of party or preferred punditry. It will also appeal to anyone who has ever dealt with the issue at first hand. Having lived through a child's death himself, he said that "neither federal nor local governments should play any role in making a family's end-of-life decisions."(ABC News)
""I had to make those decisions with the rest of my family," Thompson said. "And I will assure you one thing: No matter which decision you make, you will never know whether or not you made exactly the right decision...making this into a political football is something that I don't welcome, and this will probably be the last time I ever address it. It should be decided by the family. The federal government -- and the state government too, except for the court system -- should stay out of these matters, as far as I'm concerned."(ABC News)
I once had to make the same decision myself and can therefore now understand---though not a fan-- why he brushed off a question about the Schiavo case during his recent trip to Florida....
Nobody who has ever had to make the call can possibly convey to someone who hasn't what it's like. And nobody who hasn't been there has the right to judge any decision by anyone who has.
Thompson's daughter accidentally overdosed on prescription drugs at the age of 38 and suffered a cardiac arrest and a resultant brain injury. As Thompson says, one is never certain afterward that the path taken was the right one.
I went through the same experience when my previous husband suffered a brain hemorrhage the day after Christmas. I'd gone out for a walk and could hear my stepdaughter crying and screaming for me from a block away as I approached the house.
My husband evidently staggered out of bed, woke his eight year old son (but could only groan, which the child interpreted as "playing"), then stumbled into the kitchen where he tried to get a couple of aspirin in his mouth before collapsing. In the hospital emergency room, the doctors told me that for him to have a chance of any sort, I'd have to send him immediately to surgery. They thought he might survive, but they also thought the odds that he'd ever regain more than minimal function if he did. He'd be paralyzed, bedridden, and probably unable to talk, though it was possible he might understand. Knowing him, and knowing exactly what he'd have felt and said about the choice between that sort of life and no life, the choice ought to have been easy for me. "You have to decide now," the doctor said. I was 600 miles away from my nearest relative and all my friends were out of town for Christmas but---blessedly---two I'll call Jim and Beth. Thanks to them, I was able to decide. "I've never seen a doctor make it so clear what the right decision is," said Beth. I decided to let him go.
Not that this was the end of it. My husband's previous wife, the mother of his children, was tearing up the highway to try to persuade me to keep him alive. If Jim had not had the presence of mind to arrange for one of the doctors to speak to her as well, I don't know what she might (with very understandable concern for her children) have pressured me to do.. That doctor---whose English was more limited---was much more direct. "He'll be a plant," the doctor said to her. "He might be alive, but he'll be a plant."
He didn't look that way, of course; he simply looked as if he were asleep. That's the hardest part of the persistent vegetative state: the person is still there. When my brother, a doctor, came down the next day from South Carolina, he urged me not to do as I wished: sit next to the bed and talk to him as people talk to coma victims whose brains are still (comparatively) functional. "He can't hear you," said my brother. "The receivers aren't there anymore. He may be somewhere, but he's not there in that bed."
And it was only the sense that this was true---he was somewhere, but not there----that gave me the courage to do what had to be done. It was clear that his first wife and his children weren't ready for it to happen so I held off to give them time to see that he was really gone. After the end of the week, we took him off the ventilator and he died immediately. My brother was in the room with him, but advised me not to be. "It will look as if he is in pain," he said. "He'll have a heart attack and it may look as if he is in pain." It reminded me of the final scene of The Little Prince. I decided not to watch, but I sat outside the room with my sister-in-law doing what God-botherers do at such times: bothering God. I can't remember what, specifically, I wanted God to do.
And my point is: these decisions are harder than anyone who hasn't been there could ever believe even in the "optimum" situation where there really is no hope of a recovery. It's hard to let go, even when your brother and your dear friends tell you that you must.
So---and God knows I never expected to write these words---I (like all Democrats, I imagine) agree with Fred Thompson: the government needs to stay out of these family situations. No judge or lawyer or governor or president or state attorney is in a position to say what the people who have to decide between keeping a loved one tied to earth in a massively altered state and letting go "ought" to decide.
And most of the Republicans I know agree with this as well. "What is Jeb Bush thinking?" one of them asked. At the same time, they---like I----pitied the parents of Terry Schiavo. I don't know what I'd feel in their place, of course, but I know that the fear of grief during the period when my husband was in his "vegetative state" was much worse than the grief itself when the moment arrived. It's sad that they couldn't come to terms with it.
And I hope Fred Thompson has come to terms with the decision he had to make. Certainly I think he has reached the right conclusion about the government's role in a decision of the sort: none.
BLOGGER RESPONSES
I was curious about other blogger reactions to this issue. Is it really a matter of party or even religion? Was Jeb Bush correct in his view about what the average Republican (or even the average evangelical Christian) would say on this score?
At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte thinks this will hurt him with his supporters. Fred Thompson has a limit on pandering. I think she's spent too much time on the blogosphere if she believes that. She also finds this stance inconsistent with his views (or "views", since they seem to be or have been a bit flexible) on abortion. It is indeed inconsistent----though only in the same way that the so-called Right's views on capital punishment are inconsistent with its immense reverence toward (and sentimentality with respect to) the unborn and even the undifferentiated (as in stem cells). If every stem cell's sacred, then surely a whole human being, regardless of how flawed, is as....No, forget it. Not going there. It's been said over and over and it never sinks in because that sort of Republican evidently doesn't take seriously Jesus's caution against attempting to judge the worth of a human being in the eyes of God.
Otherwise, I find her piece rather jarring. But that's because, as I said, I've stood where Thompson's stood. I'd also hazard a guess that the views she attributes to those in the Republican base who might have supported Thompson ("He's toast") couldn't be further removed from the actual views of quite a large number of Republicans such as say, the brother who saw me through my husband's death. His right-to-die views might well appeal to the ones who actually rather like their privacy and their civil liberties (which---again in my experience---includes all of the ones who are still sane).
As seems to be borne out by a couple of conservative blogger reactions:
At Redstate, conservative blogger Erick takes the opportunity to contrast (I guess) Thompson to Edwards.
[T]here are two first tier candidates this year running for President who have lost children. On the Democratic side, rarely does a news story or interview go by without John Edwards or a campaign surrogate mentioning the tragic death of his son, Wade. It humanizes the man you'd otherwise only think of as the guy who gets $400.00 haircuts while living in 20,000 square foot houses.
That's presumably how Erick at Redstate and those who sail in him see Edwards. As a Carolinian by birth and a Democrat leaning in Edwards direction, I know that there is so much more. But I didn't expect Erick to say anything nice about Edwards. He's not pretending to be unbiased or anything.
So he---in the manner of Ann Coulter---suggests that the Edwards use their dead son for some sort of political advantage in contrast to the nobly reticent Fred Thompson.
A lot of other candidates have hurled jabs Thompson's way for his failing to address the Schiavo issue, but reading this interview underscores just how much Thompson understands the personal side of the issue and just how disdainful he is of trying to turn these issues into political battles.....It's things like this that make me a Thompson fan. He loathes to make the personal a political issue
Unlike, say, Erick and Marcotte and me.
But, hey, it's a good line, especially with a tweak or two: "He loathes to make the personal political." And it's the least one can say about Fred Thompson. Is it---sadly---also the most?
But of course I'm not pretending to be unbiased either; I liked FT as the crusty old district attorney, but I'm from the days of Nixon and Watergate, and have a certain grudging respect for Nixon's assessment of the political savvy of the people who worked in his service. Who am I, after all, to gainsay the late, Canny Old Trickster/Respected Elder Statesman?
At Right-Thinking from the Left Coast, Lee---who also knows what it's like---says:
Having gone through a right-to-die issue with my father which (thankfully) did not include a bunch of fundamentalist Christians and their armies of lawyers trying to take the decision away from our family, I appreciate the candor that Fred Thompson takes on this issue....America, the way it should be. We get drips and drabs of it from each of the candidates, If only we could roll these drips and drabs into a candidate of our own, we’d end up with someone damn near unbeatable. End of Life
I'm assuming that Lee is thinking of the GOP candidates, who do indeed seem to be each in his own special way unpalatable to the "base." I'm not sure at this juncture that anyone calling himself a Republican will be "damn near unbeatable", but this is now and the election is in the future and a long way off. Who knows what will happen if the situation changes? If Michelle Malkin's dreams come true, and something dire occurs to prove that the best defense is abject cowardice alternating with childlike rage, perhaps the majority of Americans will swing back to the right again. Perhaps.
I'm thinking---or make that "hoping"--- that most Americans are as fed up as I am with the extremes and pendulum swings and would prefer to hang in the middle with someone who stands firmly in the center. Which might have been FT but evidently...isn't. (But I did enjoy him as the crusty old law and order lovin' D.A....)
(How do these other bloggers know so much more than I do about what America should be and how did they achieve their level of certainty, I wonder? It must be so nice to be so sure you're right about everything. It's tough being a moderate Dem (and probably also a moderate conservative)---nobody with real convictions wants nuance---and often what you really think is "A murrain on BOTH your houses!")
Other responses as they occur at Memeorandum, here.
OTHER BN-POLITICS POSTS
Independents and Moderate Republicans: Sign This Letter!
Fred Thompson's First Republican Debate
Friday Funny: Joel Achenbach on Fred Thompson
Salon's Helpful Advice for Log Cabin Republicans: The Illustrated Nutshell version
Romney Adviser Linked to Nasty Anti-Thompson Website
Ron Paul Wins Maryland Straw Poll -- and Major Media Covered it
GOP Debate: Thompson Skips it, Some Candidates Take Swipes, and Ron Paul Wins it
And All This Time I Thought I Knew What Freedom Was
Giuliani: America's Mayor and Leading Baseball Fan! (update)
Giuliani: Why Other Heroes of 911 Beg to Differ.
Joe Biden Takes on Giuliani....
Giuliani Jabs Romney over Indicted Donor
[Elizabeth] Edwards for President! (The Salon Interview).
LINKED
Thompson's Daughter's Death Informs Right-to-Die Stance (ABC News)
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