LifeSiteNews.com is reporting that a young woman is about to be removed from her feeding tube. It is truly a tragic case about to become more tragic. We should worry about this instance but also be aware that this is happening every day in our country.
Old people, those with a low quality of life due to brain injury, and those suffering from terminal diseases are dying of thirst while filled with drugs to make them sleep. Every single day. They tried to do this to my father. They tried to do this to my brother. This is now common practice.
Lifesitenews: It is a truly horrifying video. For 18 minutes, Cathy Naranjo explains in a now-deleted Facebook livestream that her family has decided to remove their adult daughter Margo Naranjo from the “life support” she has needed since suffering a severe brain injury after a car accident in 2020. Margo is sitting next to her mother, opening and closing her eyes, moving her mouth. Cathy stated that she was “super nervous,” and then began to discuss the funeral and “celebration of life” as Margo shifted.
Cathy explained that before the accident, the family had been sitting around the table joking about how if something ever happened to them, they would want someone “who would pull the plug,” and claimed that Margo had said at that point that she wouldn’t want to be “kept alive by machines.” Cathy also claimed that Margo, at age 24, “was very clear about it” and would want to die rather than “not have quality of life,” although she “unfortunately” didn’t “write anything down.” Cathy continued: “I feel 100% sure that she knew what she was saying.”
But as LifeSiteNews reported, what Cathy means by removing the machines in this instance is removing Margo’s artificially administered nutrition and hydration. “In the state of Texas, that is considered a form of life support,” Cathy said. “It is ethical and legal to remove it in situations like this”—here she gestured at her daughter. “She’s under the care of amazing hospice doctors.” Naranjo insisted that Margo would not be starving to death, but that this was simply about following her wishes.
Let’s be clear here: Margo Naranjo is not dying. A feeding tube is not “extraordinary care.” Cathy Naranjo herself noted that it would take “three to five days” for her daughter to die after removal of “nutrition and particularly hydration.” I will always recall Bobby Schindler, the brother of Terri Schiavo, describing to me what his sister looked like just before she died in the same circumstances – skeletal, horrifying. When you remove nutrition and hydration – food and water – someone starves to death. Or dies of thirst.
