An Unfair Sentence

Lately I've found myself thinking a fair amount about a story I read recently.

There was a young mother (I can't remember her age but I know she wasn't that old) who gave birth to a child with severe cerebral palsy. At something like 5 or 7 years of age, this child was never going to progress in abilities beyond that of a 6 month old child. He couldn't walk, talk, interact, couldn't feed himself, wore diapers and was completely bedridden. He had to be fed almost around the clock with very small bites of food because he'd choke if he ate a whole meal at one time.

Those things were never going to change.

This mother let the child starve to death. When they found him, he weighed something like 15 lbs. She is facing 25 years to life for it.

At first I was angry, thinking and feeling she deserved it, because after all, how cruel is it for a mother to kill her own kid? It's one of those crimes against nature that you just can't understand.

But after I thought about it, my view started to change. It wasn't this mother who failed her child, it was society and religion that failed that family. What kind of life would that dead child have had? Ok so let's say money was no object and 24 hour care was provided - so he would get to lay in a bed for his entire life and never even have a life??? How incredibly selfish, unfair and sadistic is that? It's sick to a degree that I cannot fathom. Then consider the mother - how unfair is it to expect her to care for this child? How unfair for her to have it in the first place??

And that is because I am a veterinarian with extremely agnostic, borderline atheistic, views on religion. I was granted the incredibly kind and generous power to euthanize my suffering patients, although that power was granted by a really fucked up society.

Now, I'm not saying that starving this kid to death was the answer. But I think I can understand the desperation, the depression, the fear and the overwhelming depth of emotion this mother must have felt.

She should have had a right to euthanize that kid. Legally. Humanely. And without the judgment of stupid christians who all feel they get to play god all of the time anyway. And, if they knew this child was sick when it was in the womb, she should have been given an abortion.

If these things were legal, this woman would not even be in trouble because she probably would have had him put to sleep. It's a fine line on something that is incredibly unfair and inhumane. We, as a society, failed her by shoving antiquated beliefs about euthanasia and "right to life" bullshit down her throat, forcing her into an unwinnable situation.

I'm going to try to follow the story closely, but I know in my heart that the unjust spin put on it by the media is devoid of the emotion that I am certain she went through in trying to provide that level of care for a brain dead blob of a human. I know that sounds harsh, but that's the reality and I've no interest in being PC on my blog.

The world needs to wake up, get the fuck out of the dark ages, and start allowing abortion and humane euthanasia in humans.

Jack Kevorkian was right; we need to get religion out of medicine and start letting doctors do their jobs.