Slavery and murder...

(Tim) Pastor Gary Knapp of East Gate Presbyterian Church (PCA) passed along this news item concerning a mother, Edith Towers, who is trying to use Delaware nurses, doctors, and courts to murder her 23 year old daughter, Lauren Marie Richardson, who needs a feeding tube to live.

Ms. Richardson is responsive to family members and a dog. It's likely she could be taught to feed herself, but her mother assures everyone that her daughter wouldn't want to live this way.

Yet, while on the feeding tube, Lauren carried her baby girl to term and gave birth to her. The little girl's grandmother, though, isn't allowing the child to see her mother; or the mother her child.

Ms. Richardson has no living will or advanced health care directive indicating she wants to be killed, but her mother says she and her daughter had exchanged promises that they would not allow anyone to keep them alive in such circumstances. So Edith Towers is trying to get doctors and lawyers to help her starve her daughter to death, to murder her granddaughter's mother.

In a reverse image of the Terry Schiavo case, it's Ms. Richardson's father who is trying to save his daughter's life...

Outside the nursing facility where his daughter is being cared for, Randy Richardson said he hadn't gone public with the matter for seventeen months, but that he believed he had to, now:

We didn't want to do this. It is not in my nature to speak to newspeople. ... But if I don't, who will? I love my daughter.

If he doesn't, who will indeed? Not the nurses. Not the doctors. Not the aides or administrators. Not relatives, friends, or neighbors. No pastor or priest. No lawyer. No judge or governor.

The mother doesn't want this thing aired in public, saying it's "a very private situation."

As private as the cabin where Ted Kaczynski made his bombs.

As private as the graves Richard Speck dug to hide the nurses.

As private as Jeffrey Dahmer's meals.

As private as the molestation of a little boy by his older brother.

As private as the rape of a young woman by her stepfather.

As private as a woman's murder of her unborn child done under the Supreme Court's penumbric emanation, "the right to privacy."

Friends, trust me; hundreds of people knew about this impending murder prior to it being made public. Yet not one of them went to the people to stop it. No voice crying in the wilderness, here.

We are a very private nation, aren't we?

Meanwhile, we publish thousands of books and spend hundreds of millions of dollars on holocaust memorials publicizing the German people's slaughter of the defective, Jews, Christians, and other useless eaters. And didn't we all feel smugly self-righteous as we watched John Newton and William Wilberforce in "Amazing Grace," taking comfort in the faith of fellow believers who had the courage to expose to all the world the wickedness and oppression of the slave trade?

Did you see the list of Wilberforce's bandwagon fans who co-sponsored the movie? It's like a who's who list of evangelicalism. And with me, did you wonder why, with Wilberforce as our hero, we continue to sit by here in our fair land as the unborn, the elderly, and the feeble are slaughtered? Today, our nation is not built upon the slave trade, but upon the murder of aunts, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters.

Yet we are so very adept at laying garlands on tombstones.

Comments

[Erik Braun]

It is posts like this that cause me to continually give thanks for Tim Bayly and Church of the Good Shepherd, though we have never met face to face nor worshipped the Lord together in a sanctuary.

Don't grow weary in well doing.

[Wendy]

I was trained as a Speech-Language Pathologist and my first job was at a rehabilitation center that specialized in stimulating coma patients. There were physicians in the area that didn't believe in what we were doing, but I saw first-hand miraculous recoveries in patients much like this young woman. Back in 1991-2, I worked with one young lady in her 20's who endured significant injuries from a car accident. Her eyes were open, but she was unresponsive for several months. The rehab team worked with her and a year later I had the privilege of helping her apply to college. She was not the "same" girl as she was prior to her accident. She looked & sounded differently and she was most definitely brain-injured. But, as I pondered often with patient after patient, who am I to say this is what I would want or not want? Lots of deep thinking went along with a job like that.

When our dreams for our children get destroyed, when our plans get re-routed, we cry out "no quality of life" because it's not the quality we had planned for them. Most of my patients were 20 or older; few of their families were still involved in their care once the patients reached the rehab stage. It is natural to grieve what was lost, but I think that many family members just couldn't accept their loved one being so different from before.

I wanted to add these comments to share with people who might think there's nothing that can be done for these brain-injured patients. On certain occasions, there may not be...but the therapists can at least try! On other occasions, after much therapy, there are truly wonderful results. Different than before, but "different" doesn't mean someone's quality of life is poor.

Thank you for posting this article. In a world where we want to call the shots and not submit to anyone else...where a mom would want to kill her daughter because "she wouldn't want to live like this"...we need to continually get the word out to everyone that life is precious!

[Kamilla]

Wendy,

Thank you so much for your testimony. I saw similar miracles when I worked at a pulmonary rehab hospital.

Kamilla

[Bill K.]

I shared Gary Knapp's post with one of the talk show hosts I work with at WSPD. Fred Lefebvre will most likely be talking about this particular case on his show tomorrow (Wed) morning.

Granted, it will probably be from more of a constitutional point of view regarding this debate.

[Chris Arsenault]

Francis Beckwith had a blogpost on his site regarding this issue that I visited yesterday.

http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/

It included a YouTube link:

http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=lifeforlauren

with a full video that showed how active and responsive Lauren is to others.

Now when you visit the YouTube link, the video has been removed, but you can read the comments from those who viewed the video.

Actually my whole family watched it and couldn't believe how lively she is - she responded several times to questions asked by her father - affirmative responses, both in video and audio, and her mother wants to pull her feeding tube and starve her like Terri?

The media is putting the whole PVS spin on it already.
And apparently the court told the father to pull the video from YouTube, because it demonstrates her humanity & presence of mind too clearly.

God is sovereign in all things - all He's doing right now is convicting our nation of lacking faith.

The love of many is growing cold.

[Gary]

The video is down because of a court injunction. This from Laurenforlife.org

"Due to an Injunction against Lauren's father, by the court appointed lawyer ad litem (allegedly representing the interests of Lauren), we may no longer link to the video which showed Lauren responding to family members. This order, which was signed by Master Samuel Glasscock, asserts the right to privacy of Lauren by the same lawyer who consented to terminating her life."