Ralph Nader on Terri Schiavo. posted by Richard Seymour

Via Direland . Ralph Nader has decided to jump aboard the nutty pro-life bandwagon over the feeding and watering of Terri Schiavo. Doctors have confirmed that Terri is not capable of thinking or feeling, as her cerebral cortex has liquefied. So, Ralph Nader, once a fervent pugilist on behalf of the progressive Left, has teamed up with a rightwing 'bioethicist' to denounce decisions by several courts, backed up by ample medical expertise, to remove Terri's tube. According to her husband she had asked that in the event of her being reduced to such a state, she should not be forced to stay alive. Accordingly, he has been attempting to legally fulfil her wishes for some eight years. Before he did that, he had attempted every available form of therapy - to no avail.

Direland cites :

"When doctors determined that Terri had entered a persistent vegetative state, Michael flew Terri to California for experimental surgical treatments, sleeping on a cot in her hospital room.

"Even after doctors in California determined surgery would do nothing to help Terri, Michael continued to seek help. He admitted Terri to a Florida brain-injury center and hired an aide to take her out to parks and museums, in the hope it might stimulate her reawakening. It didn't."

When American lefties used Nader's alliance with a rather nutty group called the New Alliance Party as an excuse to vote for the repellent John Kerry, I thought they were missing the point (which was that such silliness was far less ominous than Kerry's support for mass murder in Iraq). I don't resile from that position. But with this idiotic intervention, Nader has eschewed fundamental left-wing principles - namely, the maximum freedom of the invididual that is commensurable with the freedoms of others. His joint statement displays remarkable ignorance of the case, and therefore illustrates a knee-jerk sympathy for 'pro-life' causes.

This is all the more bewildering in light of the fact that, on questions of abortion about which Nader was particularly vilified, he clearly stated that:

I don’t think government has the proper role in forcing a woman to have a child or forcing a woman not to have a child. And we’ve seen that around the world. This is something that should be privately decided with the family, woman, all the other private factors of it, but we should work toward preventing the necessity of abortion.

If the government has no business telling a woman what she must do with the child that is gestating inside her, it surely has no business intervening in a case against all available medical wisdom and against Terri's stated wish.

The radical Left will need better representation than Ralph Nader at the next election. And it won't emerge from within the Democratic Party.