Mon May 2/05
Blog for Whatshername

Truth be told, I thought my analogy of Terri Schiavo to the 14-year-old Jehovah's Witness girl who doesn't want blood transfusions was a bit laboured. There are things about this case other than the reversal of religious roles (i.e., in the Schiavo case the religious argument was in favour of keeping Terri alive, whereas in this case it's in favour of risking the girl's life) that kept this case out of the headlines. For one, the girl is unidentified, and you can't very well have a poster child without a face to put on the poster. For another, the government has taken what nearly everyone — even the red-faced e-mailers who accuse me of anti-religious bigotry — seems to think was the correct action in ordering that the transfusions be administered.

But in the last 48 hours, this case has turned positively sensational. The girl and her parents have gone into hiding, refusing to follow the court order. They've been spotted in Ontario, ostensibly a "more lenient" judicial destination for such cases, and plan to challenge the BC court order starting tomorrow. So we now have a family on the run from the government, fighting for its religious beliefs, perhaps being sheltered by other Jehovah's Witnesses. We have a 14-year-old girl fighting for her chance to die, on a continent that just wet itself over the prospect of the same thing happening to an unresponsive bedridden 42-year-old. This is movie of the week material, and on the blogs where Terri's cause was being championed we have… nothing. Not one single word in this girl's defense.

I don't have much of an activist bent, but I'll lay my cards on the table here: we need to find this girl and take all medical steps possible to save her life. The arguments against doing so — including her own, I'm sorry to say — are astonishingly weak:

It's no different than somebody getting sexually assaulted or robbed or something. You'd feel violated because it's not anybody else's property, it's you.

Well, that does sound rough. But it's rather ironic, as one blogger observed, that:

This [comes] from a girl who has ingested drugs, had chemo, gotten through two surgeries and accepted the possibility of having her leg amputated.

Furthermore, while it may be like rape, assault and robbery, at least it's not like murder. I'm pretty sure I have no problem with an adult deciding to refuse a blood transfusion, but it's unacceptable for a 14-year-old to do so, or for a 14-year-old's parents to so decide on her behalf. She hasn't even had a chance to realize how stupid and backwards and nutty her parents' religion is, and by God, she deserves that chance.

It's all the more sad that her beliefs will prevent her from reaping the full benefits of her treatment, but for now this is all sophistry. Blame her, blame her parents, blame her religion, but one way or another, track her down, strap her to a table and pump her full of medical science.

(The dead air on the erstwhile Keep Terri Alive blogs isn't nearly as important as the plight of the girl herself, of course, but it continues to intrigue me. Recent developments have made this case far more analogous to Schiavo, as follows: the girl = Terri; the girl's parents = Michael Schiavo; the BC Government = Terri's parents. Is the girl from Vernon's life worth less than Terri Schiavo's? If not, um, where the hell is everyone?)

[UPDATE Tue May 3/05: Here is an almost identical Australian case.]