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cattyfan
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Murder in America
She lives in a hospice facility…she’s being denied food and water…she’s been slowly starving to death for more than two weeks…by the time you read this, she’ll probably already be dead…and it isn’t Terri Schiavo.
81 year old Mae Magouirk resides in LaGrange, Georgia, but not for much longer if her granddaughter has her way. Magouirk is a widow. She is not in a vegetative state. She is not in a coma. She is not terminally ill. And the kicker? She has a living will which states plainly Magouirk wants a feeding tube should it become necessary.
But according to Sarah Foster, a reporter for WorldNetDaily, 36 year old Beth Gaddy has decided, “"Grandmama is old and I think it is time she went home to Jesus." Gaddy went on to tell Magouirk's brother and nephew, Byron McLeod and Ken Mullinax that, "she has glaucoma and now this heart problem, and who would want to live with disabilities like these?" So Gaddy instructed the medical treatment providers to withhold food and water. The granddaughter claims she’s just too busy to care for grandma. Foster’s article on this heartbreaking case is detailed and horrifying:
"Upon Gaddy's request and without prior legal authority, since March 28 Hospice-LaGrange has denied Magouirk normal nourishment or fluids via a feeding tube through her nose or fluids via an IV. She has been kept sedated with morphine and ativan, a powerful tranquillizer.
Her nephew, Ken Mullinax, told WorldNetDaily that although Magouirk is given morphine and ativan, she has not received any medication to keep her eyes lubricated during her forced dehydration. "They haven't given her anything like that for two weeks," said Mullinax. "She can't produce tears."
The dehydration is being done in defiance of Magouirk's specific wishes, which she set down in a "living will," and without agreement of her closest living next-of-kin, two siblings and a nephew: A. Byron McLeod, 64, of Anniston, Ga.; Ruth Mullinax, 74, of Birmingham, Ala.; and Ruth Mullinax's son, Ken Mullinax. Magouirk's husband and only child, a son, are both deceased.
In her living will, Magouirk stated that fluids and nourishment were to be withheld only if she were either comatose or "vegetative," and she is neither. Nor is she terminally ill, which is generally a requirement for admission to a hospice.
Magouirk lives alone in LaGrange, though because of glaucoma she relied on her granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, to bring her food and do errands. Two weeks ago, Magouirk's aorta had a dissection, and she was hospitalized in the local LaGrange Hospital. Her aortic problem was determined to be severe, and she was admitted to the intensive care unit. At the time of her admission she was lucid and had never been diagnosed with dementia.
Claiming that she held Magouirk's power of attorney, Gaddy had her transferred to Hospice-LaGrange, a 16-bed unit owned by the same family that owns the hospital."
For years there have been news reports detailing the gruesomeness of the Terri Schiavo case. The fight to save her was waged on the foundation of “not knowing” what life sustaining measures Terri would want and “not knowing” what she was hearing, thinking, or feeling. It became obvious that even the husband who sought to kill her wasn’t sure what sensations Terri could experience. Sometimes Michael Schiavo used that uncertainty as a weapon, keeping her family from seeing her as a punishment for taking their complaints to the court. Sometimes that doubt manifested itself in Michael keeping the blinds in Terri’s room closed and flowers removed so there was no stimulus to cause an inconvenient reaction from Terri. And at the end, Michael Schiavo betrayed his own insecurities about what private Hell he might be inflicting on this wife he no longer desired: as Terri lay dying, deprived of “nutrition and hydration” as basic care and maintenance is sometimes euphemistically called, he made sure the world knew she had a pleasant environment in which to expire…that he had provided her with the gentle sounds of compositions by Claude Debussey, placed flowers by her bed, and tucked a stuffed animal under her arm in a pathetic attempt to create a small comfort for the woman he fought to have executed. If he truly believed Terri was completely unaware, why did any of it matter? Did he do it to assuage his own personal guilt or to shore up his public image as a man completely devoid of human feeling?
From the time Terri’s feeding tube was removed, the “right-to-die” crowd spread the word far and wide that starvation of this kind actually induces a kind of euphoria as the person wastes slowly away…their organs shutting down one by one until their bodies become septic and then too weak to draw breath. If that is true, then the Debussey CD playing at the dying woman’s bedside seems unnecessary. And it also makes the large amounts of morphine pumped into the patient a bit confusing.
She can’t feel, but we’ll give her large doses of a strong painkiller.
She’s experiencing euphoria, but we’ll play gentle music to try to soothe her.
Obviously people who were treating Terri were unsure if she was truly “brain-dead,” as so many callously called her. If they had been assured of her vegetative state, they would not have been working so hard to make her protracted demise more comfortable. And since there were most definitely questions as to her awareness, how is it possible the courts deemed it acceptable to starve her?
41 year old Terri Schiavo brought forth a torrent of emotion from the public. Partly because of her age, partly because of her seemingly childlike state, the country was split as to whom should make the decisions about this patient’s care and life. Many who were shocked by the prospect of allowing someone to wither through starvation invoked the phrase “we need to err on the side of life.” This somehow implies it would have been fine to let her die if she would have left instructions requesting it. It’s appalling to think some Americans have reached a point where they think it’s okay for someone to ask to be terminated. In most cases when a person tries to kill themselves, they get sent for therapy.
While Terri’s parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, sought to forestall their son-in-law’s desire to be rid of their daughter – his wife, the battle lines between conservatives and liberals became more deeply drawn. A few voices were heard above the rest cautioning that, should Michael Schiavo prevail, it would be the first step to exterminating anyone else deemed unfit or undesirable. The allusion to Nazism in all its master-race glory conjured a loud response of, “That’s being extreme…that would never happen in this country.”
But it already is happening here, and more often than anyone wants to admit.
Which brings us back to Mae Magouirk. Beth Gaddy, the granddaughter, wasn’t completely truthful when she told the medical facility she had Mae’s power of attorney. Gaddy actually only controls the finances, and at the time had no legal authority to dictate what treatment the elderly woman did or didn’t receive. Magouirk’s siblings should legally still have the right to decide what care their beloved sister should be given. Mae’s nephew has said he would be happy to have his aunt live with his family and volunteered to move to a bigger house to accommodate her needs. Why Gaddy wouldn’t surrender her unwanted granny to them for care is a mystery.
Instead Beth went to court and somehow persuaded a judge to grant her emergency guardianship. More sickening, Judge Donald Boyd is leaning toward granting full guardianship to Ms. Gaddy, who seems disturbingly eager to speed her grandmother’s death. There is no explanation why Judge Boyd favors seeing Mae Magouirk die.
In the Netherlands, it is now legal for a doctor to decide if someone gets life-sustaining – not life-saving- care. It is not uncommon for them to let the elderly or infirm simply expire, not bothering to tend them in any way, and babies who are born with disabilities could be left to die if they have the misfortune of being attended by some physicians there who have decided the “quality of life” would not be high enough. It’s a relief Stephan Hawking and Helen Keller didn’t receive this exceptional medical attention.
The United States, however, sees thousands like Mae Magouirk die every year in the same manner as she now suffers. Sometimes these men and women have someone like Bob and Mary Schindler or Ken Mullinax who loves them enough to fight for them. Other times they are the anonymous patients who have been warehoused in nursing homes, hospices, and hospitals across the country. Terms like “compassion,” “choice,” “dignity,” and “comfort” have been altered from their original definitions to mask sinister intentions…alternative words are used to describe ending someone’s life like “merciful release,” “aid in dying,” and “terminal care.”
And in a case like Mae Magouirk they call it “involuntary euthanasia.”
Where I come from, that’s murder.
---Berta Collins Eddy
copyright Almost Normal Publications 2005
