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Mar. 21st, 2004 02:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sophiaserpentiaPope John Paul II said Saturday the removal of feeding tubes from people in vegetative states was immoral, and that no judgment on their quality of life could justify such "euthanasia by omission."
Fantastic. Does that mean the Vatican will be helping families pay the catastrophic medical bills of keeping a person alive, for years or decades, when there is literally no hope of recovery?
The Pope called for more money for a "cure," but there is no "cure" for massive brain damage. Small amounts of damage can repair themselves over time, amazingly enough, but if the prefrontal cortex is destroyed, there's no one home and there never will be.
Why is our culture so afraid of death? Death is part of life. Death is fore-ordained at the moment of birth. To be honest I am not afraid of being dead, I am not afraid of the thought that who I am will one day disappear into oblivion. It's the process of dying itself I'm afraid of. All that pain and panic.
Fantastic. Does that mean the Vatican will be helping families pay the catastrophic medical bills of keeping a person alive, for years or decades, when there is literally no hope of recovery?
The Pope called for more money for a "cure," but there is no "cure" for massive brain damage. Small amounts of damage can repair themselves over time, amazingly enough, but if the prefrontal cortex is destroyed, there's no one home and there never will be.
Why is our culture so afraid of death? Death is part of life. Death is fore-ordained at the moment of birth. To be honest I am not afraid of being dead, I am not afraid of the thought that who I am will one day disappear into oblivion. It's the process of dying itself I'm afraid of. All that pain and panic.
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no subject
Date: 2004-03-21 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-03-22 03:42 pm (UTC)One of the big reasons I have such a relatively short cut off time is due to my own psychological problems. At least a third of the time I live in a world that seems like it should be familiar but appears altered in weird and hard to define ways. It is most unpleasant. I really do not even want to think about how it would feel if everything that seemed familiar really was different in ways that I could never fully grok due to lack of any common experiences.