Life Worth Protecting

When Lauren Richardson’s mother told her back in September that she and her father had agreed to take Lauren out of the hospital and care for her at home, Lauren wept deep and emotional tears of joy. Her mother cried, too, as they held hands as mother and daughter. It was the first of many beautiful exchanges that Lauren and her reunited family are still enjoying today.

This would be a touching but not unusual story, except that some doctors and activists call Lauren a “vegetable” because of her brain disability. Indeed, some attorneys, doctors, and activists were disappointed that Lauren’s mother helped to create this beautiful moment by rejecting their desire that Lauren’s life be ended. Life just irritates some people.

This is especially true of Widener Law School associate professor Thaddeus Pope, who has publicly declared, after the news broke of the reconciliation between Lauren’s father and mother, that the government should be able to take Lauren away from her unified family and starve her to death.

Pope has also declared that people like Lauren are subhuman, simply because they have disabilities that allegedly place them in a “persistent vegetative state,” a diagnosis about which science now has grave doubts. Perhaps not coincidentally, Pope’s former job was as an attorney for the same large corporate law firm that intervened for free in Lauren’s case last year to try to starve her to death. And that firm worked in tandem with Jon Eisenberg, an attorney who helped cause Terri Schiavo’s death.

Pope’s extreme views are unfortunately all too common in medicine and law. The movement for assisted suicide and euthanasia is always claiming to uphold compassion and patients’ rights, but inevitably they seek to impose death without consent. When they look at persons with disabilities, they see a duty to die instead of recognizing an opportunity to offer loving and ordinary care, pain relief, and reverence for the miracle of life even amidst difficulty.

Lauren never signed any form wishing to be starved to death, and she never critically analyzed the differences between brain injury, minimal consciousness, and PVS, or what kind of care to accept in those conditions. Her current care plan was signed by her parents, a Delaware Chancery Court judge, and an independent court-appointed attorney. Pope is wrong that the court found that Lauren wanted to die. In fact, the court vacated a recommendation that it make such a finding. And he is wrong when he says that Delaware statutes provide a mechanism for starving Lauren to death now that her parents are caring for her. The statutes do not allow such patients to be killed against a family’s unanimous wishes.

That said, change is nonetheless needed. The statutes do categorize so-called “PVS” patients as more worthy of death than the rest of us. If the patient’s wishes are not written down and the family believes in withholding food and water, or if they disagree among themselves about it, the patient can be starved to death. This relegates PVS patients to a subhuman category.

That premise is even more disturbing in light of recent scientific evidence showing that the 35-year-old category “PVS” is badly in need of an update. PVS patients are often misdiagnosed and sloppily examined by doctors. Brain scans prove that they exhibit complex thought and imagination even when they can’t express themselves. And new treatments have “woken up” some patients even after decades of infirmity, while others wake up on their own. As more and more people in this country retire under the looming possibility of rationed health care, tremendous economic pressure will mount to kill patients with disabilities.

Delaware statutes are therefore in urgent need of amendment to prevent these pro-death premises from expanding. PVS should be deleted as a category that allows death by starvation without the written consent of the patient.

This simple but important change will not impose any painful or burdensome treatments, because food and water are not burdens. But they will guard against the idea that having a severe disability makes you less than human. No one should be allowed to decide that an innocent life is worthless. And people who profit from an innocent person’s death should not get to decide when that death will occur.

On the contrary, Lauren’s life and her family both testify that people with disabilities are miracles who teach us how to love. Their value as persons is not diminished by their disabilities. Delaware law should more fully affirm this reverence for life and should reject the premises of death.

Matt Bowman is legal counsel with the Alliance Defense Fund, a legal alliance employing a unique combination of strategy, training, funding, and litigation to protect and preserve religious liberty, the sanctity of life, marriage, and the family. Bowman represents Lauren Richardson’s father, Randy Richardson.