Dear List(s),
We review the philosophers the noted of all time.

As we speak is "human life" but a moment in time, or as some believe
no life, that life begins in earthly death?

On this holiday of Christians is it a different day, does one human life
blatantly scourged by the media, account for all such lives affected?

Should ALL in the hospice rest in peace, is she there for a purpose
beyond mankind?

She is one, there are many...

Peace,

Karen G.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/27/weekinreview/27lela.html?pagewanted=1
Did Descartes Doom Terri Schiavo?
By JOHN LELAND

Published: March 27, 2005


N the parade of faces talking about Terri Schiavo last week, two notable
authorities were missing: Aristotle and Descartes. Yet their legacy was there.
Beneath the political maneuvering and legal wrangling, the case re-enacted a
clash of ideals that has run through the history of Western thought. And in a
way, it's the essential question that has been asked by philosophers since the
dawn of human civilization. Is every human life precious, no matter how
disabled? Or do human beings have the right to self-determination and to decide
when life has value?
"The clash is about how we understand the human person," said Samuel Gregg,
director of research at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and
Liberty, a conservative policy group.
The plea last week to prolong Ms. Schiavo's feeding, against the wishes of
her husband or what courts determined to be her own expressed inclinations,
echoed the teachings of Aristotle, who considered existence itself to be
inviolable.
On the other side, the argument that Ms. Schiavo's life could be judged as
not worth living echoed Descartes, the Enlightenment philosopher who defined
human life not as biological existence - which might be an inviolable gift from
God - but as consciousness, about which people can make judgments.
For most of history, the conflict between these schools of thought has
allowed room for compromise, said Robert Veatch, a professor of medical ethics
at
Georgetown University who supports the right of patients to suspend treatment.
He cited a Roman Catholic judgment from the Middle Ages that if a patient
needed to travel 300 miles by donkey cart to a shrine to be healed, that was too
much. "The idea that all life is valuable or sacred has in almost all settings
been qualified in some way," Professor Veatch said.
Yet this idea that all life is sacred has exerted a powerful force in
America, said Mark A. Noll, a professor of history at Wheaton College, a
prestigious
evangelical school in Illinois, and the author of "The Old Religion in a New
World: The History of North American Christianity. " It fueled the abolitionist
movement of the 18th and 19th centuries, which insisted on the humanity of
slaves, against the prevailing views of social science. In the early 20th
century, the same ideal stood up against eugenics, which advocated forced
sterilization to prevent the weakest members of society from reproducing.
In both battles, Professor Noll said, people who held the sanctity of all
human life as a religious conviction triumphed over an Enlightenment contention
"that said 'No, we can qualify this value' " - meaning the value of a human
life could be determined by scientific thought.
As late as 1927, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the government
could sterilize mentally retarded people against their will. "Three generations
of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the court's
decision involving a woman mistakenly deemed retarded.
In this context, Professor Noll said, "the preference for life has been a
protection against the exploitation of little people by big people." The
conflict
as it exists now began to take shape with the emergence of modern medicine in
the late-19th and early-20th centuries, said Gary M. Laderman, an associate
professor of religion at Emory University and author of "The Sacred Remains:
American Attitudes Toward Death, 1799-1883."
Medical breakthroughs that prolonged human life by technological means
changed the way Americans could see death and by extension, the ways they
defined
life.
The setting for death shifted from the home to the hospital, where doctors,
rather than religious leaders, claimed authority. Medicine lionized the figure
of the heroic doctor, and treated death as a kind of failure, Professor
Laderman said. Doctors were free not to tell patients that they were terminally
ill,
claiming for themselves the right to determine what was appropriate. Death
became a "medicalized" state, to be determined by human expertise. Like life, it
could be treated as a medical option.
Page 2 of 2)
By the 1960's and 1970's, medical patients began to claim this right for
themselves, said Bruce Jennings, a senior research scholar at the Hastings
Center,
a bioethics research group that has supported patient rights. In this, they
conspicuously followed the model of the political and consumer movements of the
era, which shifted authority away from experts and institutions to
individuals.

To adopt Professor Noll's language, they redefined the little people.
"This offered a slightly different way to frame the issue: not so much as a
conflict between valuing life and the freedom of choice, but a different
attitude toward technology itself," Mr. Jennings said. "On the one hand, there's
a
widespread feeling in the United States that everything can be cured and we
don't have to die. But there's another fear of imprisonment by technology in a
way that undermines our integrity and dignity. It's claiming freedom from these
institutions or technology."
The philosophical line in this history, then, is not straightforward, but
includes a peculiar American twist: The evangelical revival of the 18th and 19th
centuries produced the abolition movement, which gave rise to the women's
suffrage movement, which inspired the civil rights movement, which led to the
patient's rights movement. But now the patient's rights movement faces off with
many 21st-century evangelical Christians in the Schiavocase.
At the same time, the scientific legacy of the Enlightenment, which argued
that human life resided not in the body but the mind, is now being undermined,
as modern neuroscience demystifies elements of thought and personality as
heartless biochemical or genetic processes. The mind is simply prisoner to the
body's DNA.
The ideas at play over this history do not conclude with Ms. Schiavo's case,
but feed into arguments over abortion, stem-cell research, assisted suicide,
the death penalty and even animal rights.
In their competing claims, these ideas are part of what defines America, said
Courtney S. Campbell, a professor of medical ethics at Oregon State
University who has argued for the rights of patients to pull the plug.
"It goes back to the foundations of the Republic - the right to life and the
right to liberty in the Declaration of Independence," he said. "It's a
deep-rooted conflict that goes to the core of who we are as a people and as a
political society, so it's not surprising that it can be polarizing."



Karen Hallenbeck~Sikorsky~George BS,RN,UM,QC
http://hometown.aol.com/anewplanforyou
http://hometown.aol.com/anewplanforyou/sb.html



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Ya'll are special you truly are, and to be the
catalyst for this group is a miracle for I know
in my heart that God's will created this group(s)
and each of you are very very special to me, always
no matter what I AM SO PROUD to a "part of" what
this family has become..AND WILL BE!!!!
Interqual Certified
Published Psychiatric Researcher
Advocate for those in CIP, HIV, Psychologic Pain
"A Higher Power is necessary to find the ability to withstand self
destruction.."


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