Gathering Goat Eggs

Rejoice, O earth, in shining splendor,
Radiant in the brightness of your King!
Christ has conquered! Glory fills you!
Darkness vanishes for ever!

My family and I celebrated the Easter Vigil at the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in Washington DC. What a glorious liturgy. What a glorious church. What glorious music, supplied by local notables The Suspicious Cheese Lords. Then the Easter Bunny left me a basket full of Wilhelmina Peppermints and a chocolate orange. Easter makes me so happy.

No one in my family likes the traditional roasted leg of lamb/baked ham sort of Easter dinner, so we had a spicy lamb tagine, couscous with saffron, and a big cheesecake with blackberries in syrup on top. And I don't have to get up at 6 tomorrow to take anyone to the bus stop.

Wow. GGE got a mention on NRO Corner. Welcome everyone, but I'm afraid there's not much to see; I've only been in business since last Saturday.

Andrew McCarthy of National Review Online apparently wrote this post before, but posted it after, Judge Whittemore rejected, for the second time, the Schindlers' request for a temporary restraining order mandating the reinsertion of their daughter's feeding tube.

I am emphatically not a lawyer. Following my husband's even-tempered attempts to explain the arcana of procedure or precedent requires layers of nested 'no, I didn't get that.....what does word mean?" objections that would try the patience of the patron saint of lawyers himself. So caveat lector and let's go on.

This is the best, clearest, most compelling argument about the deficiency of the law surrounding this case that I have yet seen. McCarthy says

[I]f PVS were considered a crime Terri had been indicted for, rather than a condition she is afflicted by, the record in this case would have been laughed out of court five minutes after an appellate tribunal started looking at it. Not because the proof was inadequate, although it surely was. Simply because the wrong standard was used. If a Florida court tried to deprive a person of life based on facts establishing capital murder that had been proved only by clear and convincing evidence, the editorial pages would be teeming with condemnation. Both the ACLU and the death-penalty bar would be lined up for miles outside the Supreme Court in anger over a due-process outrage. And they'd be right.

and

The Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments do not distinguish between the lives of capital murderers and the lives of other persons. They don't mention "criminal" and "civil" distinctions. In this context, they command simply that no person shall be deprived of "life...without due process of law." There is no reason in the text of the Constitution to believe that "due process of law" should have a different meaning depending on whether the life to be taken by state action is that of a convicted criminal or that of some other person.

This frightens me. If I understand correctly, this issue will not be raised in the present case, because Terri will die and this issue will be moot — and to raise it in the future will require that another situation just like Terri's come before the court.

The now unbearably sad saga of Terri Schiavo is of necessity spinning off collateral damage. This time the victim is William P. Cheshire, MD, a board-certified neurologist and associate professor of neurology at the Mayo College of Medicine in Jacksonville, FL. He is also a neurology consultant at the Mayo Clinic, and a volunteer advisor to the Florida Department of Children and Families. In that capacity, he made as much of an examination as he was allowed of Terri Schiavo, and concluded that the court-approved diagnosis of PVS was quite possibly mistaken, and that further examination was indicated.

Poor Dr. Cheshire is also associated with the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. And it gets worse. Not only does he openly admit he's a Christian (but only an Episcopalian — Assemblies of God would have been so much more alarming), he's an adjunct at Trinity University! This are, apparently, extremely suspicious connections for a man of science — so suspicious that there must be something fishy going on here.

Now, I'm not surprised when readers of left-wing hysteric Markos Moulitsas Zúniga castigate Dr. Cheshire as "Jeb's tame MD" and a "right-wing nut." I'm not even surprised when the New York Times publishes an unflattering article that quotes duelling neurologists who are offended that another doctor with an apparent pro-life agenda has dared to step on their turf when they haven't even heard of him, and quotes the flakiest line of a seven-page affidavit while ignoring pages of carefully argued medical analysis. (Note to Dr. Cranford from a former UMSPH Gopher: in a pissing contest between Mayo and the Hennepin County Medical Center, I wouldn't be so sure you're going to emerge as the BSD. Especially when your own vita is long on the medical ethics of offing infants and old folks and short on actual, you know, neurology.)

But it really, really disappointed me to see this bit of snobbish bigotry from Elizabeth Whelan, president of the American Council on Science and Health. Mainly it disappointed me because I know Dr. Whelan. I'm sure she wouldn't remember me, but I remember her very well. We were both members of a coalition of free market organizations that collaborated for several months in the run-up to the 1990 Earth Day media blowout, when I was the Director of Environmental and Science Policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. I later spent some intense working time with her mentor, Edith Efron. I admired Ms. Efron a great deal, and she had nothing but the highest praise for both the analytic quality and the practical applicability of Dr. Whelan's work.

I moved on from policy wonk work, and spent ten years as a public health researcher, split between the Regenstrief Institute and the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. I had always assumed that should we cross paths in the future, unlikely as that might be, I would find Dr. Whelan the same fair-minded and intellectually rigorous person I remembered from back then. But I discover I was wrong. For she writes:

As it turns out, Dr. Cheshire is not "renowned" as a neurologist — his limited publications focus on areas including headache pain and his opposition to stem cell research.

I'm not sure what it takes to be a 'renowned' neurologist, but he is indisputably a board-certified neurologist who is employed — not only to treat patients but to teach future physicians — at one of the most respected medical institutions in the world. A PubMed search turns up 34 medical journal articles, which do indeed include a good many on trigeminal neuralgia (so easy to dismiss as 'headache') and a few on bioethics, but also Parkisonism, syncope, myasthenia gravis, hypotensive akathisia, spinal cord infarction, and reflex sympathetic dystrophy. Unlike the 'renowned' Dr. Cranford, who spends most of his ink fretting about how his patients die, Dr. Cheshire seems to spend some time considering how his patients might manage to live a little longer.

Dr. Cheshire never conducted a physical examination of Ms. Schiavo, nor did he do neurological tests.

That is true. It is also true that he did not examine Mrs. Schaivo because neither he nor anyone else may do so, by order of her guardian and the judge overseeing the case. However he does, in his affidavit, explain exactly what tests he would run, were he permitted, why, and what he would conclude based on the results.

Dr. Cheshire is director of biotech ethics at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, a nonprofit group founded by "more than a dozen leading Christian bioethicists." Everyone is free to be guided by a personal agenda — and it is clear that Dr. Cheshire has his.

Well now, here we come to the nub of it. Dr. Cheshire has an opinion about the ethical propriety of embryonic stem cell research (an opinion at odds with the opinion of Dr. Whelan, but you had probably already guessed that). Moreover, his opinion on the ethics of embryonic stem cell research is, by his own admission, informed by his Christian faith. Therefore: his analysis of Terri Schiavo's condition must be a fake, motivated by his religion, not his science.

Dr. Whelan, I have news for you. We all have personal agendas. Those of us who value honesty admit this upfront about ourselves, and do our best to discover and transmit the truth anyway, even if it sometimes collides with our deeply-held beliefs. Those of us who value charity do our fellows the honor of assumimg that the best of our own behavior is no better than the worst of theirs.

It makes no difference to me if Terri Schiavo is or is not in a persistent vegetative state. My faith informs me that her life is no less precious, no less worth living than mine. So it really doesn't matter to me whether Dr. Cheshire is right or not. Which means I can be reasonably confident that my personal agenda is not the reason I still feel like saying: Dr. Whelan, you're full of crap.

Update:
Ramesh Ponnuru agrees!

So the 11th Circuit split on the temporary restraining order. My very smart lawyer husband, who has a pretty good track record of predicting when cases (even his own) are going to tank, thinks there is little possibility relief will come from the Supreme Court. I see no chance that the Florida Senate will act in time. So now Terri Schiavo is doomed to die, by command of a court of law. This makes me sad and depressed and angry. It seems that our culture is mired in a quicksand; the map label reads The Romance of Death. We who cherish life struggled, but in the end sank a little deeper. They say that happens with quicksand.

There is one thing my sadness and anger makes me resolve, however. Politically (and in most other ways) I'm fairly conservative. I was not opposed to the death penalty until I became a Catholic thirteen years ago and began to grapple with the ideas later expounded in Evangelium Vitae. Despite the fact that I eventually argued myself to a position where I opposed the death penalty as constituted in the United States judicial system, I never felt strongly about it. I never became emotionally involved when I heard stories about impending executions. I regretted it, certainly. I felt it was unnecessary and wished it did not happen. But it did not make me sad and depressed and angry. I do now live in a death penalty state, although only four executions have been carried out here since the Supreme Court ban on state capital punishment was lifted in 1977. I have never been involved in attempting to ban the death penalty in Maryland.

I henceforth resolve, however, that when such a case does occur in future, that I will remember how sad and depressed and angry I felt today. And I will remember that there are people who feel, and rightly feel, just as sad and depressed and angry that the state has ordered a life extinguished, even if I cannot feel that way myself about the case at hand. And I resolve to pray for the eternal rest of every executed prisoner, just as today I pray for Terri Schiavo, and her family.

with the Hell Kitten. She's really an undersized Siberian Husky. For a few brief minutes, peace reigned supreme. Click the image for a larger picture.

I stayed up late last night watching the House vote on the bill granting Terri Shiavo's parents the right to pursue their claims in federal court. And now I'm refreshing my home page every five minutes to see if there's been a decision on reintstatement of the feeding tube from Judge Whittemore. In between, I've had the opportunity to hear a lot of people spouting off on the CSPAN call-in line, WMAL talk-radio, and the table next to me at Wendy's.

If I have to hear one more snooty liberal who thinks Roe v. Wade is the bedrock of American jurisprudence yammer about Republicans trampling on states' rights and federalism, my head is going to explode.

I don't want to get into a discussion of the motives of the various parties. I have formed an opinion of the characters of the main actors, as everyone has, no doubt. But it's not necessary to assume malice, or even indifference, on anyone's part to conclude that the judicial process which has culminated in the court-ordered withdrawal of food and water from Terri Schindler Shiavo is not a process to which I would want myself, or my loved ones, subjected.

You want states' rights? Here's an idea. Each one of the fifty state legislatures should herewith be bombarded with demands that they codify in law the proposition that in the absence of a clearly stated and legally executed document directing the contrary, no state court is empowered to order that a medical facility should deny food and water to an incapacitated person. Period.

Update: This article lays out the legislative and judicial history of the guardianship regime in Florida. Warning: 37 pages of sometimes dense legalese.

Gathering goat eggs.

My youngest daughter has a Game Boy game in which you play a farmer. You keep your chickens and cows happy, eventually you get a wife and the chickens lay platinum eggs, which are the very best kind of eggs. Much better than large eggs. Then you make mayonnaise and sell it at the market and become rich and buy more chickens and some baby furniture because now your wife's pregnant. The online reviews uniformly panned this game as boring beyond belief, but the youngster loves it.

Not only loves playing it, but loves talking about playing it. In the car, she has a captive audience for her babbling. I've threatened for years to tie her to the roof rack if she won't shut up, but it's just a bluff and she knows it. The older daughter (who is Florence King trapped in a teenaged body) and I lost all sense of decency and started mocking young Norman Borlaug with a litany of ridiculous agricultural tasks she should perform. Vacuum the llamas. Polish the chickens. Lacquer the barn. Gather the goat eggs.

Gather the goat eggs. As it escaped my lips, I realized that's what most of my life has amounted to. Faithfully performing tasks that make no sense, seem both impossible and pointless, are vaguely silly — and yet someone seems to need them done. So here we go. Let us gather the goat eggs.