On the whole, I like reading Michelle Malkin’s blog. I more often than not agree with her posts. Of course, she also tends to suffer from partisan blinders and fails to point out similar faults with conservatives, although not all the time. However, in reading this post about the plight of Haleigh Poutre there is this part of Michelle’s post that I think is precisely backwards.
As state officials prepared to remove Haleigh’s life support, the supposedly impossible happened:
A day after the state’s highest court ruled that the Department of Social Services could withdraw life support from a brain-damaged girl, the agency said yesterday that Haleigh Poutre might be emerging from her vegetative state.
DSS also said it has no immediate plans to remove her feeding tube.
”There has been a change in her condition,” said a DSS spokeswoman, Denise Monteiro. ”The vegetative state may not be a total vegetative state.”
Monteiro said Haleigh is breathing on her own, without the ventilator she has depended on for four months. Monteiro also said that doctors at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield elicited responses from Haleigh during tests performed yesterday.
Everyone had given up on Haleigh–except Haleigh.
This is a huge story, a wake-up call to “right-to-die” ideologues who recklessly put such unlimited trust in the medical profession and Nanny State.
At that point I came to a screetching halt. The “Nanny State”?!?!? Excuse me, but I tend to think there might very well be something to this right-to-die position. And for me, part of it is precisely what Michelle is saying, I don’t want the Nanny State making a decision for me. If I want to die, then why should the state have a right to prevent me from making that decision and following through on it? Granted, this is different than the case of Haliegh Poutre in that she hasn’t indicated anywhere that she wanted to die if she came to be in such a state, but to use the rhetoric that Michelle is using is rather disingenuous, IMO.
Michelle continues,
The same government bureaucrats and doctors who had conclusively deemed the 11-year-old girl “hopeless” and her vegetative state “irreversible” now tell us she is responding to stimuli and breathing on her own.
They were wrong.
Yes, they were wrong. But the wrong people have been executed by the state, yet I didn’t see Michelle arguing for a moritorium on the death penalty. I’m sensing a fair amount of hypocrisy here.
Further, one of the differences between this case and the Terri Schiavo case is the length of time. Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state for years. From the sounds of it, Haleigh Poutre has been in a “persistent vegetative state” for months (note that the quotes in this sentence are deliberate). Perhaps if Haleigh were 25 years old, blind, and with all indicators pointing towards severe atrophy of the brain tissue I think the issue would then be similar.
Frankly I find Michelle’s rhetoric misleading and more than a tad hypocritical on this one.
