For One Family, the "One More Chance" Goes on Forever

Listening to the Schindlers today, especially the father, getting on TV at every opportunity to say "the people who want to kill my daughter are getting their way" and using terms like "judicial homicide" to refer to the judges and telling us how "sick dogs are treated better, made me think.

I found myself thinking of the black Texas baby who at six months of age on March 15th had his feeding tube removed by a Texas hospital against the mother's wishes because the compassionate George W. Bush had signed a law stating medical facilities could terminate care against patient/family wishes if the patient/family has no money to pay.

Vigils weren't held for that baby except by his family. The mother held the child from the time they disconnected his feeding tube until he died in her arms.

Millions of dollars weren't diverted to that family to help them find a way to let that little boy live. CNN and MSNBC and all didn't elevate that mother to saint status and have her in front of the cameras every moment they could get. No one asked questions in the press asking if it was "right" to starve that tiny boy to death. No one except the hospital and the politicians the top tier of the health industry bought and paid for (hello Mr. Bush) wanted to terminate his brief stay on the planet.

Congress didn't convene a special session for him (in fact, Mr. DeLay had just helped push through a Bush budget that cut more than $15 billion for the care of uninsured and under-insured Americans leading long-term care - a fact that would have hurt that baby rather than helped him).

Mr. Bush certainly didn't spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to rush back to Washington to grandstand and save that baby. And his brother, Jeb, certainly wouldn't have skipped his first meal in years to hold press conference after press conference trying to seize that baby from the hospital to save him as he has with Terri Schiavo.

Millions in state and federal tax dollars weren't devoted to give that baby's family endless access to courts that have heard the Schiavo case more than 30 times now.

None of those great Christians trying to push into Mrs. Schiavo's hospice with milkshakes and burgers for her probably ever considered even buying the black child's family a sandwich while they watched a system sentence that baby to death for being poor. Bet they wouldn't even consider slipping a dollar into an envelope to help with the expenses of the black child''s funeral.

And the lovely man in Carolina who offered a small fortune for a hit man to kill Terri Schiavo's husband and the brave Judge Greer who ruled by law rather than emotions would not have offered that money to rub out the head of the hospital who terminated the black child's care or a judge who just followed the law in allowing the baby's feeding tube to be disconnected.

Nor did I hear that the Pope had prayed personally for that child or that the Vatican was imploring the White House to protect the child from summary death.