Too angry to think of a title
I've been purposely avoiding blogging about the Schiavo case, as much as I've wanted to, both because anyone who reads this regularly can probably guess my stance, and because I have fairly little to add beyond what others have said. But I do want to point people towards two posts that John Scalzi links to here; Scalzi's post itself is also excellent, as is the post on ethics that he includes, but the really crucical one is the medical evaluation. Let me quote a bit of it, first from a quotation within the post and then from the post itself:
By mid 1996, the CAT scans of her brain showed a severely abnormal structure. At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this condition. [...] The only debate between the doctors is whether she has a small amount of isolated living tissue in her cerebral cortex or whether she has no living tissue in her cerebral cortex.
[...]
Terri Schiavo's cerebral cortex is not damaged, it is absent.
[...]
The key to the 4 minutes and 20 seconds of video is that Schiavo seems to be responding in a meaningful way to specific stimuli. All 17 experts who reference the videos take for granted that they demonstrate meaningful emotional or communicative responses. Could they really all be wrong?
Oh, yes. All you need to know to illuminate the question is that the six snippets of video were selected from 4 1/2 hours of tape. [emphasis in original]
This isn't about sanctity of life or anything like that (and even if it was, I'd place large sums of money on Schiavo's husband knowing her preferences better than her parents if she was an even slightly average 26-year-old), this is about someone who is not, by many conventional definitions, a human being any longer, and who has through the (unintended, I'm sure) cruelty of her parents and others has been trapped in that state for fifteen years. Go find, if you can stomach it, some of the statements her parents have issued; they are depressing and revolting.
By any standard of decency, the thing that was Terri Schiavo should be allowed to die. What a grotesque misappropriation of modern medicine.
By mid 1996, the CAT scans of her brain showed a severely abnormal structure. At this point, much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this condition. [...] The only debate between the doctors is whether she has a small amount of isolated living tissue in her cerebral cortex or whether she has no living tissue in her cerebral cortex.
[...]
Terri Schiavo's cerebral cortex is not damaged, it is absent.
[...]
The key to the 4 minutes and 20 seconds of video is that Schiavo seems to be responding in a meaningful way to specific stimuli. All 17 experts who reference the videos take for granted that they demonstrate meaningful emotional or communicative responses. Could they really all be wrong?
Oh, yes. All you need to know to illuminate the question is that the six snippets of video were selected from 4 1/2 hours of tape. [emphasis in original]
This isn't about sanctity of life or anything like that (and even if it was, I'd place large sums of money on Schiavo's husband knowing her preferences better than her parents if she was an even slightly average 26-year-old), this is about someone who is not, by many conventional definitions, a human being any longer, and who has through the (unintended, I'm sure) cruelty of her parents and others has been trapped in that state for fifteen years. Go find, if you can stomach it, some of the statements her parents have issued; they are depressing and revolting.
By any standard of decency, the thing that was Terri Schiavo should be allowed to die. What a grotesque misappropriation of modern medicine.
