http://context.themoscowtimes.com/story/141069/This week, U.S. President George W. Bush melodramatically cut short one of his innumerable vacations and flew back to Washington to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo when a Florida court granted her husband's request to cut off her life support after she had spent 15 years in a vegetative state. But days before, even as the president was supporting his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, and congressional Republicans in "defending the culture of life" in the Schiavo case, doctors in Houston were pulling the breathing tube from the throat of an ailing infant. The boy suffocated within seconds, legally killed -- against the wishes of his anguished mother -- in accordance with a draconian law signed as a "cost-saving" measure by the state's former governor: George W. Bush.
There were no frenzied protests, no camera-friendly prayer vigils, no preening politicians at Texas Children's Hospital when 5-month-old Sun Hudson took his last breath. There was only his mother, Wanda, holding him in her arms as he died, the Houston Chronicle reported. Sun suffered from an extreme form of dwarfism, which is incurable and usually fatal. Early on, doctors recommended cutting off the breathing tube that kept his undersized lungs working. He was inert, they said, unresponsive -- essentially comatose.
Wanda Hudson disagreed. "I talked to him," she said. "He was conscious." Moving, looking around, he responded to her. Although the odds were long, she wanted to give him more time to develop, not give up on him after just a few months. Wishful thinking, a despairing parent's denial? Perhaps. But the law signed by Bush in 1999 took the decision out of her hands and gave it to hospital bureaucrats, allowing them to shut down a patient's life support -- even against the wishes of the patient's family or guardian -- if the medical brass decide that treatment is "nonbeneficial," the Chronicle noted.
Indeed, why throw away good money pumping air down the gullet of some defective infant, just to mollify his nobody of a mother? For, unlike Schiavo -- a nice middle-class white woman, a political marketer's dream -- Wanda Hudson was just another worthless black woman living in poverty, unable to afford prenatal care. Who would waste a dime on trash like that? It's much more beneficial to funnel that cash into the coffers of your political patrons -- like George and Jeb, now wallowing happily in the swamp of campaign grease they get from giant medical corporations. In return, they push government policies designed to keep Big Medicine's profits sky-high while gutting public obligations to provide health care for the hoi polloi.
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