{"id":1152,"date":"2006-03-15T19:56:51","date_gmt":"2006-03-15T19:56:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1152"},"modified":"2006-03-15T19:56:51","modified_gmt":"2006-03-15T19:56:51","slug":"dispatches_from","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1152","title":{"rendered":"Dispatches From The Culture Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nearly a year after the fracas surrounding Terry Schiavo, a Minnesota legislator has cast himself in the role of a champion of disability rights.  Tim Wilkin, a Republican House representative, has introduced a bill that forces medical providers to place feeding tubes in patients<\/A> that do not have a living will or other “clear and convincing” evidence of their wishes.  The bill is entitled the “Minnesota Starvation and Dehydration of Persons with Disabilities Prevention Act<\/A>.”  It sounds noble, doesn’t it?  All across Minnesota, people with disabilities must be slowly wasting away while their loved ones stand at their bedsides, gleefully rubbing their hands together and muttering “Excellent!”<\/A>  Somebody should call the newspapers.  <\/SPAN><\/FONT><\/DIV>
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I don’t understand what this bill is trying to achieve.  It would strip family members and designated proxies of the ability to make decisions about an individual’s nutrition and hydration, but it’s completely silent on other interventions like artificial ventilation, dialysis, or countless other procedures.  Why the fixation on food and water?  Is being forcibly fed somehow seen as less intrusive than being forcibly intubated?<\/SPAN><\/FONT><\/DIV>
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I’m trying really hard to understand the logic behind this bill, because on first blush it reads like a manipulative and cynical exploitation of one family’s tragedy for political gain.<\/SPAN><\/FONT><\/DIV><\/DIV><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly a year after the fracas surrounding Terry Schiavo, a Minnesota legislator has cast himself in the role of a champion of disability rights.  Tim Wilkin, a Republican House representative, has introduced a bill that forces medical providers to place feeding tubes in patients that do not have a living will or other “clear and […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-iA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}