Few events illustrate the warped sense of values that prevails today better than the attention paid to the whales trapped in Arctic ice in Alaska. Extraordinary measures, including the use of Soviet icebreakers, were taken to free them, yet at the same time, dependent human beings are denied ordinary, necessary and readily available medical treatment and care, including food and water.
In the latest case, a U.S. district judge ruled Oct. 17 that the feeding tube providing nourishment and life to Marcia Gray, a 49-year-old brain-damaged patient in Rhode Island, can be withdrawn. Unlike the California whales, Mrs. Gray is not dying. The substitute judgment of her husband (that she would not want food and water) outweighs the state`s interests ”in the preservation of life, the prevention of suicide, the protection of innocent third parties and the integrity of medical ethics,” the judge reasoned!
Clearly, our national priorities are grotesquely inverted when we mount an Operation Rescue for two obscure, nonhuman animals while ignoring the scores of patients who are being ordered to death by starvation.
