I’m Hungry. Please Feed Me. I Want Food.

In the United States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert to death despite her pleading “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “Please feed me,” and “I want food.”

From an article titled The Revenge of Conscience by J. Budziszewski appearing in FIRST THINGS.

http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9806/articles/budziszewski.html

Here are the opening two paragraphs:

Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same. First between adults, then between children, then between adults and children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach of winter from the change in the color of leaves. As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation “intergenerational intimacy”: that’s euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term “sodomy”: that’s avoidance. My students don’t know the word “fornication” at all: that’s forgetfulness.The pattern is repeated in the house of death. First we were to approve of killing unborn babies, then babies in process of birth; next came newborns with physical defects, now newborns in perfect health. Nobel-prize laureate James Watson proposes that parents of newborns be granted a grace period during which they may have their babies killed, and in 1994 a committee of the American Medical Association proposed harvesting organs from some sick babies even before they die. First we were to approve of suicide, then to approve of assisting it. Now we are to approve of a requirement to assist it, for, as Ernest van den Haag has argued, it is “unwarranted” for doctors not to kill patients who seek death. First we were to approve of killing the sick and unconscious, then of killing the conscious and consenting. Now we are to approve of killing the conscious and protesting, for in the United States, doctors starved and dehydrated stroke patient Marjorie Nighbert to death despite her pleading “I’m hungry,” “I’m thirsty,” “Please feed me,” and “I want food.” Such cases are only to be expected when food and water are now often classified as optional treatments rather than humane care; we have not long to go before joining the Netherlands, where involuntary euthanasia is common. Dutch physician and author Bert Keizer has described his response when a nursing home resident choked on her food: he shot her full of morphine and waited for her to die. Such a deed by a doctor in the land that resisted the Nazis.

Here are some details on the Nighbert case mentioned above:

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.