Friday, March 18, 2005

sorry, Sun

Today the US Congress issued subpoenas as an end-run around a court ruling to remove the feeding tube from the persistent vegetative-state sufferer Terry Schiavo. The hypocritical and ethically-challenged Tom Delay demonstrated the suppuration of church and state by observing that this weekend was a significant date in his own avowed religion as he verbally smeared several liberal politicians over their support of the standing legal ruling while he promoted his own interference in the case as morally superior. It's inspiring how courageous Delay and his repugnant ilk are when they find it politically convenient. Ask Sun Hudson.

If you could.

You can't.

Sun Hudson died quietly Tuesday, March 15th at a hospital in Houston, Texas. He was born with a genetically-based malformation of the lungs called thanatophoric dysplasia. He was five months old. His mother, Wanda Hudson, had fought every day for the five months he was alive to keep him on the life-support methods that were all that kept him alive. He would never have been able to live without life-support, no matter how long he lived, his case was hopeless and not treatable by contemporary medicine to any extent other than the ability to keep his heart beating. The hospital's ethics committee reviewed Sun's case, and determined that all life-support should be stopped. No other hospital was willing to take Sun and continue to keep his heart beating, as was permitted by Texas law. Wanda Hudson took legal steps to try to force the Houston hospital to continue providing life-support for Sun, but a regional court ruled that the hospital currently treating Sun was within their legal rights, and the life-support was withdrawn. Sun died shortly after.

No radical right-wingers picketed the hospital. Tom Delay didn't call Sun's death by suffocation "barbaric." The governor of Texas didn't intervene. There were no all-morning wall-to-wall coverages of Sun's disconnection from the extreme measures that were all that kept him "alive," in exactly the same mindless, consciousness-free, alive-only-as-a-beating-heart existence that Terry Schiavo and many other people are in. Sun's passing was sad, but proper. Terry Schiavo's passing will be sad, but proper.

Sun Hudson was black.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home