I’m really, really tired of pro-lifers. They annoy the living daylights out of me. It’s not merely their fetus worship to the detriment of women, but at the other end of life. My dad died in 2014, and he basically died when his body shut down because he couldn’t swallow anymore. (Alzheimer’s is horrible.) So he went to hospice for palliative care. That was one of the worst weeks of my life, watching my dad basically die of thirst.

So I’m getting one of these pro-lifers chewing me out because of this, because my father, while he was still lucid, signed all sorts of documents stating he wanted no heroic actions taken. And we followed his instructions and took no heroic actions. We didn’t give him water because he could not swallow. And yet this woman is telling me we should have continued giving him water. I finally lost my temper.

He couldn’t swallow. DO YOU GET IT YET? He.could.not.swallow. He lost his ability to swallow. Do you think we should have just shoved water down his throat, so he could aspirate it into his lungs and die by aspiration pneumonia? Is that kind of death OK with you, O Judge of Life?

— Deana “Welcome to Gritty 2019!” Holmes (@mmmirele) February 2, 2019

What angers me about this is that we don’t have a good way to deal with end of life issues, so we have these things where we put a man in a clean, well-lit room and basically leave him to die of thirst instead of doing something else because we’re afraid of the horrible word “euthanasia.” You don’t know how much I’ve thought about this over the last five years, especially after a Canadian friend of mine with terminal lung cancer applied to and went to Dignitas in Geneva. She would have preferred to have stayed in Canada and died there, but this was under Harper and she was terrified she’d be kept alive against her will. So off she went to Switzerland and she had her dignified death, completely lucid and knowing exactly what she was doing.

I worry about people like this young woman, who seem to get their jollies over the possibility that we can force women to carry pregnancies we don’t want and keep people alive even after they can no longer swallow and are comatose.