covici@ccs.covici.com (John Covici) (06/06/91)
Index Number: 15999
MINNEAPOLIS MAN VOWS TO FIGHT NAZI DOCTORS TO KEEP HIS WIFE ALIVE
by Linda Everett
U.S. Club of Life
May 30 (EIRNS)--In an attempt to set a precedent for medical
fascism, the Hennepin County (Minn.) Board of Commissioners has
authorized a Minneapolis public hospital to sue for the ``right''
to kill a patient against her stated wishes and those of her
family. The Hennepin County Medical Center petitioned Probate
Court Judge Patricia L. Lebois this week to have Oliver Wanglie
removed as legal guardian to his wife of 53 years, who is now
severely brain-damaged, and appoint someone more amenable to the
Medical Center's goal of removing 87-year-old Helga Wanglie's
life-support. Lebois is expected to hand down a decision within
weeks.
Put bluntly, this means your right to believe in the sanctity of
human life, your right to the medical treatment that sustains
that life, and your right to society's protection of that
life--all went on trial this week in Minneapolis.
- `Until the Lord Calls Her' -
Oliver Wanglie knows what's at
stake. He testified today that, when doctors demanded his wife's
ventilator be removed, he told them that ``There are thousands of
doctors killing babies in the womb at the beginning of life, and
some are killing people at the end of life, as Hitler did to the
elderly. History teaches that a nation without a high moral
standard has crumbled to dust.'' He would never, he told the
court, remove his wife's ventilator--even with a court order.
Helga, he said, was a devout Lutheran who had said she wanted to
stay here ``until the Lord called her.''
Helga Wanglie entered Hennepin County Medical Center with a
fractured hip in late 1989. For five months she was conscious, on
a ventilator because of breathing problems. Doctors insisted she
be moved to Bethesda Hospital in St. Paul, where, despite the
fact that she was a difficult respiratory patient, her ventilator
was removed. She was found unconscious and rushed to another
hospital, because Bethesda lacked the capability to revive her.
By the time she was resuscitated, she had sustained severe brain
damage. When she was returned to Hennepin County, doctors
repeatedly asked--and then, last December, threatened--to
disconnect her ventilator.
Although all her hospital bills are reportedly being paid,
hospital officials demanded the right to stop her life-support
because keeping her alive on life-support is ``futile care'' that
``is not in the patient's interests.'' Oliver Wanglie and his two
adult children adamantly refused.
Because Wanglie never wavered from the strength of his--and his
wife's--conviction that ``Only He Who gave life has the right to
take life,'' hospital officials tried in court to portray Wanglie
as ``senile,'' saying he always veered off on ``tangents''
involving his worldview and was unable to focus on his wife's
condition. The fact is that during two hours of cross-examination
today, Wanglie, who is licensed to practice law in three states,
recited his wife's complete medical history from memory and
corrected officials on incorrect dates and records. As for
Wanglie's ``worldview''--at least {he,} unlike his adversaries,
recognizes Nazi euthanasia when he sees it.
- Hitler's `Ethic' -
Two precedents are involved here. Economic Malthusians and
euthanasia advocates want the courts to: 1) recognize a
hospital's authority to eliminate what they call ``futile care''
which sustains anyone whose life, they allege, is not worth
living (a term coined by Adolf Hitler in his euthanasia program);
2) legitimize the movement to kill outright all levels of
severely brain-damaged patients, whether they are labeled
comatose, ``permanently unconscious,'' or in a so-called
persistent-vegetative state.
It is significant that Hennepin County Medical Center is home to
the notorious pro-death neurologist Ronald Cranford, who has
proposed that the courts begin the debate to determine if
patients like Helga Wanglie should even be considered
``persons.'' If they are not conscious, he says, they lack
personhood, and thus, do not have the protection of civil or
constitutional rights.
Cranford has organized medical ethics committees throughout the
country, as well as in Hennepin itself. It is not at surprising,
then, that the hospital's ethics consultant, Steven H. Miles,
says people like Helga Wanglie don't have the right to
``inappropriate''--that is, life-sustaining--care. The type of
ethics promoted here don't exactly quote Hitler's view that the
chronically ill are a plague to be expunged from society--but
they come close. With Hitler, Cranford et al. consider people
like Helga Wanglie to be {not human--} ``non-persons,'' the
killing of whom is not murder.
The supposed ``alarm'' that
medical ethicists are displaying around this case, because it
denies ``patient autonomy'' (that darling of all right-to-die
precedents), is totally bogus. The entire field of medical
ethics, so-called, is built on the destruction of the principle
of the sanctity of life. Saving and sustaining human life becomes
``debatable'' only after that principle has been erased from the
medical profession's sense of purpose.
>From New Federalist V5, #21.
John Covici
covici@ccs.covici.com