Sat Apr 23/05
Discussion topics for your next Watchtower delivery

I've waited two weeks now, and I think that's long enough: where the hell is the fiery debate about whether the unnamed 14-year-old British Columbian girl should be forced, against her religious beliefs, to receive a blood transfusion? (Search "+Jehovah +Vernon +transfusion" in Google News to see the article for free.) It's not like it came out of left field, after all — if memory serves, North America just went through an exhausting shouting match over the fate of a woman whose last words were spoken before this young Vernonite was even born. The final result there was that spousal rights and the preponderance of medical evidence trumped the entirely understandable inclination, in George W Bush's words, to "err on the side of life." But some people — Canadians among them — were positively hysterical that Terri Schiavo be kept alive, and now just weeks later we have a young woman with fully operable cancer who wants to risk death rather than undergo a routine medical procedure, and no one's making a peep.

Alright, enough with the naïf act. The reason no one's up in arms about this is obvious: not to say that secular arguments didn't exist, but the "let Terri live" crowd was overwhelmingly religious (which is to say that most of them were religious and many had let it overwhelm them). Item #4 of the Protestor's Code: No opinion shall be too complex to fit on a picket sign. So if the Canadian arm of Blogs for Terri were to take up the case of the girl from Vernon, they'd have a bit of a problem, yes? Do they err on the side of life again, or do they switch allegiances and jump aboard the "religious rights" train? Ten seconds, folks, starting… now.

David Dahlgren, the Vernon girl's lawyer, is fighting to have her declared a "mature minor," which would give her the right to make her own medical decisions, but it's difficult to see why this should be an age-of-consent issue at all. It would have made it a much easier case, but even if she had desperately wanted the transfusions, it wouldn't have been her decision to make. 14-year-olds can't officially make these choices, as I understand it — their parents do. The province took power of custody away not from the girl, in other words, but from her parents, so why wouldn't they take it away from another adult, the girl herself, if it ever came to that?

Optics play a huge role, of course. 14-year-olds may have very intense religious beliefs, but they are unlikely to have intense religious beliefs that differ from their parents'. Whether it makes any sense or not, those over the age of majority are presumed to have examined their beliefs in the illuminating light of intelligent adulthood. Thus, Governments realize that they can get away with these custody-taking stunts only with children. Adults are too attached to the idea that the state can't really force them to do anything along those lines to put up with it, and quite rightly. I do wonder, though: what would happen if a person who wished to die simply refused a blood transfusion at the hospital? Would he be judged unfit to make the decision and receive the transfusion anyway? Would he have to proclaim his belief in Jehovah just to refuse treatment? That doesn't really seem fair.

Here is a very reasonable Catholic voice, Father Raymond J de Souza in March 22's National Post, on Terri Schiavo:

The question in dispute is whether the feeding tube by which Terri is fed and hydrated is normal, basic care, or an aggressive medical treatment that could be foregone. Terri's parents are devout Catholics who accept the Church's teaching that, while life is always a great good, it need not be prolonged at all costs in all situations. Hardly a month goes by when I am not in the hospital with a patient who has, in full accord with Catholic teaching, declined further treatment in face of imminent death — or serious illness where the treatment is disproportionate to the likely results achieved.

But in Terri's case, death is not imminent.

I can't be the only one who sees the parallels. As such, how can Father de Souza and the Catholic Church have nothing to say about the girl from Vernon? She's 14, has all her faculties, and needs only routine medical treatment to afford her a very good chance at a full and normal life. Do they not want to criticize another religion for fear of weakening their common stand against the dubious threat posed by secularization? Would they let the girl from Vernon be a casualty on the road to not having to rent out their banquet halls for gay weddings? All I can say is: thank God for secularism, and let's hope the court-ordered transfusions take place and help save her life. If not, hopefully I'm wrong about this whole atheism thing and she'll be one of the 144,000 lucky people who get to go to heaven.