Today we are told that a dead woman who was kept artificially alive by machines, gave birth to a child. We are further told that after bringing a child into the world, this woman (who was for all intents and purposes already dead) actually died—this time, for sure.
Though not formally stated in the official press releases or articles covering the story, we are left with the implicit understanding that in the eyes of the attending medical officials, this brain-dead woman was not really a person any longer. The further implication is that she had lost her value as a living person, except insofar as her body could perform the function of a birthing machine. Once the mechanical mission was complete, the spiritless body was allowed to die. After all, it is implied, the woman had in reality died when her brain ceased to function. Consequently, withdrawing oxygen from the mother was little different than withdrawing electricity from a lifeless, artificial incubator.
But here is another perspective: a soul-inhabited woman who was very much alive, though having suffered a cerebral aneurism which resulted in 78 days of severely diminished brain capacity, delivered a baby yesterday. After the birth of the baby, the value of mother’s life was deemed by authorities too insufficient to justify the emotional and financial cost of continued care during her handicapped state. The decision was made to kill her by depriving her of basic life support during her time of need. Sometime after life support was removed from her body, she died, meaning that for the very first time, her spirit left the body and was ushered into the presence of the Judge of the Universe. That same day her organs were then harvested for transplant purposes.
A Word on the Battle Over Terminology
The adage “he who defines, wins!” has great truth. We are losing our culture because we are allowing the enemy to subvert our language and our definitions. By calling abortion “reproductive freedom,” proponents of baby vivisection have desensitized the American public to the holocaust of our present era. By capturing the definitions of “marriage” to include anything but the God-given definition of “one man and one woman for life,” the sodomites and their sympathizers in both the Republican and Democrat parties have done more to subvert the family in America than all the “gay pride” marches in history.
Now the medical community has jumped into the act. By reducing people to “vegetative” status we are expected to perceive such individuals as something less than human. By declaring living people with severely diminished brain functions as “brain dead,” we somehow think of these individuals as soul-less and lifeless. After all, what could be wrong with declining basic care of food, oxygen, and shelter to someone who is already dead, let alone a mere vegetable?
The horror of the Terri Schiavo murder of 2005 highlights just how quickly our American culture (including professing Christians) is willing to accept new definitions of life and death. These definitions make it oh-so-convenient to pull the plug on handicapped individuals like Terri, thus relieving adulterous men like Mr. Schiavo of the duty to be faithful “in sickness and in health, until death do us part.”
By bamboozling the public into thinking that some living people are not really alive in a human sense, euthanizers and ethical relativists have done a landmark job encouraging the average Joes of our culture to accept a new death ethic for the 21st century.
The Bible Alone Provides Us With The Ethical Basis to Define Life
But the Bible is clear on the issue of life. God gives life and He alone may take it. He delegates the taking of life in certain circumstances to the civil magistrate, and to those acting righteously in defense of self or others. He does not delegate the self-conscious taking of life to medical practitioners, nor does He allow new ethical standards for life and death to be invented by professors, politicians, or physicians.
Not only does God give and take life, but He makes it clear in the Bible that there is only life and death. There is no third status—no quasi-life. We may speak figuratively about “holding onto life by a thread,” or “barely alive,” but legally and judicially a man is either dead or he is alive. His status before God and man is determined by whether he is in fact dead or alive. There is no middle ground. Absent from the body, we are told in Scripture, and present with the Lord. Death involves far more than a heart stopping, or a brain malfunctioning, it involves the separation of the soul from the body. Until the soul is separated from the body, a man is alive. (The issue of where the soul resides is a complex consideration for another time.) There are great mysteries here, but we can be confident that as long as the soul remains in the body, a person is alive. There is no middle ground.
It should be clear by now that death involves far more than the break-down of bodily functions. Individuals resuscitated after extreme trauma, heart failure, and significant reduction in bodily functions are examples of the fact that life is a great mystery, and that there are unusual cases where it is possible to be “alive” for brief periods of time even when the body experiences systemic failure.
Men and women in a state of coma are very much alive, irregardless of their brain wave patterns. Their souls have never left their bodies. Those that revive out of long-term coma—sometimes after more than a decade of unconsciousness and minimal brain wave activity—and once again speak and think and go on to live their lives, are proof that the soul has never left the body. Despite being labeled “brain dead,” or “human vegatables,” men and women with impaired brain activity are nonetheless very much alive.
The next time you are told by officials that some one is brain dead, remember three things: first, despite even severe brain damage, enough of the brain is working such that some level of bodily functions is still operational. These individuals are not vegetables or machines. They are people. Second, remember that we have examples of physicians using this descriptive, misleading terminology, only to discover later that the supposedly “dead” brains and “vegetative” people regain substantial capacity of that which was previously deemed dead. Finally, please remember that no one is dead until the spirit leaves the body. Do not accept this deceptive terminology as the basis for starving (or depriving of basic care) another living individual. Supposedly “brain dead” people are in fact, soul-filled individuals who are very much alive, though in a severely disabled condition.