There is yet another case of a woman whose legal guardian wished to remove her feeding tube so that she would die. Ora Mae Magouirk is in the hands of a granddaughter, Beth Gaddy, who wants her to die. The story on her condition is being followed at WorldNetDaily.

The family managed to get her removed from the hospice where Gaddy had sent her to die even though Mrs. Magouirk had a living will against such treatment. She was not in a coma or vegetative state. She was not even terminally ill but had a treatable aorta dissection. The granddaughter simply decided that it was time for Grandmamma to die. She is now receiving treatment and her condition has improved.

Mrs. Magouirk was living with assistance from a paid caretaker with some assistance from Gaddy with shopping and running errands. She was elderly but living in the same house that she and her late husband had lived in for over 50 years. Even if she had reached a condition where more help was required, even nursing home placement, it was her decision to make, not the granddaughter's decision for her to die.

I am appalled at how disconnected so many people have become from the rest of society, even from their own relatives. This is apparently not uncommon treatment at a hospice. Hospice care was set up to ease the dying process for the terminally ill, not to force the death of people no longer wanted by their relatives. Unfortunately, as what happened to Terri Schiavo and what may happen to Ora Mae Magouirk and who knows how many others even now shows, even a living will may not be sufficient to protect a disabled patient who cannot protect herself from directives issued by an untrustworthy relative who has a legal guardianship.

Right-to-life groups have protested that the legalization of elective abortion and suicide would lead to involuntary euthanasia. It appears that they were tragically right. With every such death, the culture of death grows stronger and its proponents more sure that they are correct. They push for even more "rights," blindly ignoring the possibility that they one day may be on the receiving end of such cruel mistreatment. They are more obsessed with winning over their political opponents rather than in working out solutions that would humanely protect people who are not hopelessly dying.

Their mindset comes from a culture where a problem is treated as a win-lose situation, where someone must lose for the person to win. That win-win solutions are often possible and more desirable does not factor into their thinking. People are treated as things to be either used or discarded to eliminate waste. Such efficiency may enable a person to increase his performance at work, but it does not necessarily make for good relations between people.

It is all the more alarming that both patients were women. The feminist movement was supposed to persuade society to treat women as more fully human beings instead of commodities for the use of people in power, but it seems to have done the opposite. Instead of being honored for their contributions to society as wives and mothers, these roles are being treated as hindrances to their usefulness as workers. If they do not make a contribution to society outside of their personal relationships to other people, they are considered worthless.

Thus a disabled wife or grandmother might not "want to live" any longer than her relatives say that she should. Instead of valuing the contribution that people of different ages and experiences make to the human community, they are judged by who is a specimen still in useful life. Who is still a winner among us, and who has life passed by and thus should pass on?

Ora Mae is able to recognize and talk to her family as she recovers from being dehydrated from March 28 to April 9. She wants to go home, not to die. Most of them love and value her and want her to live. One does not, and she is the one who currently has the legal authority to make decisions about her care. At least this judge was somewhat more sympathetic to the rest of the family, and so she is receiving medical care. However, he has left the case, and who can say what the judge who replaces him will do.

I thought about that as I sat on the terrace swing this afternoon. The violets in the yard are nearly through blooming and the yard needs cutting. They were pretty in their youth, lifting tender blossoms over crisp rosettes of leaves. Now their petals are dull and faded, shrunken over seed pods dipping towards the ground to free seeds to start the next generation. I can leave them a while longer or mow them down with the grass and weeds tangling around them. They have had about enough time to ripen their seeds.

We leave a few blooming weeds among the grass rather than tightly regimenting the lawn to only grass in efficient uniformity. We could pull them and have the same neatly groomed lawn as the neighbors, but spring without violets wouldn't be the same. We have other blooming plants and shrubs for the same reason. They add a diversity even as they age that enriches the experience of viewing the garden as the seasons pass.

It does make the yard much harder to tend. Mowing grass from one side to the other would be much easier without tree roots and flower beds to avoid, but one might as well carpet the yard and be done with it. Those plants add variety to the seasons, even during the times that they aren't in flower. We don't uproot them when they have passed their bloom, no matter how they might complicate yard work later in the year.

So why should we uproot people past their bloom when they complicate our daily lives?

Why should they be of no further use to themselves or their families once their seeds have sprouted into the next generations caring for their own families?

Why should such questions even have be asked?