Terry Schiavo again
A post from October 2003.
I'll also add a link to a fairly recent reading that says the "persistent vegetative state" diagnosis is used too liberally.
Dahlia Lithwick blandly
repeats a report that there are 35,000 PVS patients in the US. Should they all be killed? Is it all up to that one crucial person with legal authority? Isn't it relevant that in the Netherlands, where they have physician-assisted suicide, they also have people being killed who, er, didn't ask for it, yet who had the mental capability to discuss the subject.
Our daughter definitely felt pain and discomfort, and communicated it to all of us very clearly. Yet she didn't focus her eyes, or respond consistently to stimuli. Would the experts who favour starving Terry Schiavo say our daughter experienced only "somatic" pain, whatever that is? It might be a common-sense question to ask why we didn't kill her; the idea of starving her would have seemed grotesque.
Thanks, once again, to Mickey Kaus. It does seem likely that the lonely and the frail are at risk of being killed because of "conditions" that would not lead to the death of the more fortunate. Those who are prone to depression will be talked into giving up.
Yes, the Republicans collectively are suspicious on this issue--coming at the very end, trying to make one vulnerable Democrat in Florida look bad, etc. But it's an interesting debate, in the elected Congress (not just among a few judges). Who else was going to trigger this debate? In a way the progressives seem to win the debate in the end; the main result of the Nancy Cruzan case was that the public accepted that food was a medical treatment; the main result of Schiavo seems to be an increase in living wills. Still, with the boomers getting old, we may all want to consider: when do we push someone onto the iceflow, and when do we not?
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