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They did not do this on a whim. They carefully considered it, and it had to be approved, before it was done. Caring for a severly mentally disabled person is so grueling, and, with advances in modern medicine, they are living longer. I wonder about the endurance of and strain on parents in their 60s and 70s trying to change the diapers of a 200-lb. adult having a tantrum.
When this story first broke, I remembered the state instution for the mentally retarted in my home town. Mainstreaming was still a new concept when I was young, and some of the residents at the "training school" came to our schools for classes. They were classified as "Trainable Mentally Retarted" and were taught in separate classes, but rode the bus and went to lunch and the library with the rest of us. My brother worked at the training school when he finished high school. He now does home construction and says that working in the training school was more physically demanding than construction. The stress of the job drove him out in less than six months.
The residents aren't all shiny-clean Corkys from "Life Goes On," or "angels," teaching the world about love and kindness and all the other sentimental twaddle you often hear about the mentally disabled. The worst cases are wheelchair-bound, have to wear helmets to protect them from splitting their own skulls open by falling or banging their heads repeatedly against the wall, and are grossly overweight from being unable to move much. They have no control over their bodies and impulses - they will fling the contents of their filled diapers, hit with the power of a prizefighter, masturbate whenever and wherever they feel like it, and sexually grope employees and other patients. My brother would come home emotionally drained, and often black-and-blue from patients assaulting him as he lifted them into the tub or into bed. He would be spit on, vomited on, his nuts would be grabbed, he'd have to clean up the results of a warp core breach in the diapers - all in a day's work.
My mother has been friends with a woman for more than 40 years, we call her Aunt Daisy. Aunt Daisy's eldest son Mark went to Vietnam - and took a bullet in his neck. He survived, but has spent the last 30-plus years in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the neck down, unable to move on his own or speak. Aunt Daisy and Uncle Bob have spent their lives caring for him, and lost their Golden Years when they should have been enjoying their children and grandchildren. Uncle Bob is now dying of cancer, and Mark will probably outlive them both. Aunt Daisy and Uncle Bob can leave nothing to their other two children when they die - everything they have left is going into a trust fund for Mark's care.
At least some of that is in the future for Ashley's parents. And they won't be healthy, athletic 18-year-olds like my brother was. They'll be middle-aged going into elderly, bodies and spirits worn down by the previous years of caring for Ashley. I can understand why they've made this choice. The ethics will be debated for a while, but I won't demonize them for making a hard choice in hard circumstances.
