- CNN News (March 9)

(...)
Euthanizing terminally ill newborns, while still very rare, is more common in the Netherlands than was believed when the startling practice was reported a few months ago -- and experts say it also occurs, quietly, in other countries.

"These were all very clear and very extreme cases," he said, where the newborns were suffering from severe, untreatable spina bifida, with major brain and spinal cord deformities and sometimes other birth defects. "Do we have them continue life in suffering or do we end the life and end the suffering?"

Other research, he said, shows that is often the case in other countries.

In France, 73 percent of doctors in one study reported using drugs to end a newborn's life, but those cases aren't reported to authorities. Meanwhile, 43 percent of Dutch doctors surveyed and between 2 percent and 4 percent of doctors in the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany and Sweden reported doing so.

Where do we draw the line? How and when do we as a society, determine that a human being is unfit to live? Having had chronic progressive multiple sclerosis for years, stage 4 cancer(twice) with extensive radical surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, still living with constant pain and spasms, some of which occasionally shut-down my airway, do I have to worry about Judge George Greer and the euthanasia supporters coming for me? When is it time to kill me and millions of others like me, by painful starvation and dehydration?

Suprisingly, I don't think that I ever really learned to love life and know how to appreciate others until I heard the words, "you have advanced cancer and you are going to die!" The pain that I and others have been through and continue to have simply reminds us that we are alive, that life is beautiful, and indeed, life is worth living regardless of our health or cognitive abilities. We are alive today and life is beautiful!

You will find that this story is a common theme among the sick, the disabled, and their families. We are not burdens to society, we are capable of giving more to society than we receive - it's just that often our currency is love and life-lessons, an appreciation of the beauty of this life we hold in our hands, rather than in dollars. Just ask any parent of a child with Down's syndrome how much their child means to them and who gets the most out of the relationship.

My family is happy for the extra time we've had together, I am happy to have had the extra time, and the many disabled and very sick people that I have known and have been associated with over the past 12 years of illness have given me and others far more love and appreciation of life than they have received. Such is the case with Terri Schiavo and her family.

It's time to put this issue to rest by sending Terri home with her family. As for George Greer, George Felos, Michael Schiavo, and others like them, I hope that before they die they learn of the blessing of life that God has given us, and that this power of death that they seek is not a power, but a curse. In God's hands the death that awaits us all is surely a thing of beauty, but in the hands of men like George Greer, it's a curse on our entire society. He and others like him must be stopped now, else who's "death by committee" is next? Once we embark on the slippery slope of euthanasia for the disabled, we will have taken the final step of a forced exit for anyone who can be determined to be "unfit to live" by a judge like George Greer.