Ford is to be congratulated on his recognition, shared with the Pope, of the humanity of PVS patients, and on his desire in principle to reject the deliberate ending of their lives. But his arguments in favour of withdrawing tube-feeding are not so benign, and those which refer to the undesirability of prolonging life as such are rather worrying. As Ford says himself, all human lives are worth living; it follows that the extension of severely disabled lives is not something bad per se, if the means used are reasonable. Death is \u201cnatural\u201d only in the sense that illness and pain are \u201cnatural\u201d: these are \u201cnatural evils\u201d which should often be prevented, whatever good fruits they may bring. To offer, at very least, basic nursing care to those who are persistently unconscious powerfully signals the value we place on their \u201cbeing\u201d \u2013 their presence in the world. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An exchange on the ethics of tube feeding and its withdrawal. One side And the other Ford is to be congratulated on his recognition, shared with the Pope, of the humanity of PVS patients, and on his desire in principle to reject the deliberate ending of their lives. But his arguments in favour of withdrawing…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\n
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One side And the other Ford is to be congratulated on his recognition, shared with the Pope, of the humanity of PVS patients, and on his desire in principle to reject the deliberate ending of their lives. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}