Rape Victim in Phoenix

Another black eye for Phoenix. The first black eye, I guess, would be Sherriff Joe Arpaio. This time it’s the story of the young woman who has been in a coma for the last twenty-six years and just gave birth to a son. More than a black eye, this is the stuff of a horror movie even more horrendous than all of the Halloweens put together. And the horror isn’t just in the raping of a comatose woman; it’s the horror of keeping this child alive even though one can hardly call a twenty-six year vegetative state being alive. The news story gives rise to all sorts of questions: 1. How could she have been taken care of by a male nurse or attendant in a closed (and probably locked) room with no one else there? 2. How could anyone who bathed her or cared for her not have noticed that she was pregnant? 3. And finally, why should this child/woman be kept alive for twenty-six years in a vegetative state? Somewhere in the news story it’s called “cognitive impairment.” Well, yes. If one hasn’t been able to learn anything after the age of three, that person would certainly be cognitively impaired. I noticed in the coverage that DNA samples of all male employees at the Hacienda Healthcare facility are being taken to find the person who raped her, and raped her probably more than once. And then what? The rapist will be identified, tried for rape, and sentenced to fifteen or twenty years? What punishment should be meted out to the administrators who allowed a single, unsupervised male to care for a comatose woman? And finally—even more disturbing than this criminal act—what sort of religious belief would insist that all lives are sacred and must be maintained no matter what the circumstances? Shouldn’t a reasonable level of quality of life be part of the equation? She is a vegetable being kept alive with breathing and feeding tubes, with no mental growth from age three to age twenty-nine. I’d say that condition is way below an acceptable quality of life. How is keeping her alive humane or benevolent? She’s like a three-year-old soul floating around in space and time. Wouldn’t allowing her to die be far more humane and benevolent than keeping her alive?