Terri Schiavo

[ianess]

What views are held regarding this poor woman's intolerable situation......particularly in regard to her being legally starved to death?   I hold strong views and would welcome a debate.

[luckyboy]

I originally sided with the husband, but i have to say neither side comes out of all this very well, and the decision to starve her to death is totally inhuman but its a incredibly sad story...and the use of this poor woman as a political football has been distasteful to say the least, but still i can understand the feelings of her parents perfectly understandable.heartbreaking. 

[butter1]

I don't think you can compare Terri to a baby (meaning the parents their parents depriving their child of food) - Terri had brain damage from suffering a heart attack.  She was, horrible to say, a vegetable.  Although starving her to death is unhuman - they didn't have anyother choice other than ending her life like that.  Cruel as it seems, I think it is better for her to die, I don't think anyone would really want to spend their days in that condition.  I feel for the husband and the parents.. both the same.  The parents obivously didn't want to let their daughter go.  But at the end of the day, no one really knows the true facts...only those close to Terri herself. 

[El D]

ianess - abortion is pretty much the same at later stages. The baby is basically born and then left to die.

I can't understand why so many people would prefer to grub around for 20 years than to take control and have someone you love end your suffering. I know that precedent is difficult to control but I sincerely hope that I will be able to avoid the situation if it ever happens to me in the future.

[slimfandango]

The Terri Schiavo problem is the same as the problem we have with disabled people, and disfigured people: we are all mortal, and the kind of life we construct for ourselves is really kind of 'an Emperor's Clothing'. I'm not saying it's wrong, or we should change it, I just think it explains why we find the whole thing so confusing and disturbing: it's not that we're angry with the way she dies, really, this is just masking our deep seated disturbance by death itself. We just don't get it. It's the surest fact of human existence, but it's the one we reject the hardest. And this should be so, given our condition. Everything about living human life is about energy, creativity, power, overcoming, and in the end this is something that is absurd, unwanted, ugly, and unfeeling, that just wipes it out in a stroke. We spend much of our time trying to ignore it. I think much of working life, leisure, entertainment, drinking, drug use (I'm not condemning them outright) is about distraction, escaping this reality, because the human mind tries to draw back to it. Terry Schiavo enters our horizon and we are forced to confront it. We know she might be mentally dead, but we want her to go on as long as possible, because that is our fight too, the fight against the absurdity of death. There is never a right answer to her predicament, because there is never a right answer to the predicament of any human life.

[jno]

Terri's husband insisted she wouldn't want to be fed. Considering that the cause of the heart attack that put her into a coma was bulimia, he was surely right?

[ianess]

Can we get back to trying to justify starvation as an effective and humane way to end anyone's life?

[El D]

I believe the point is that no other individual is involved, therefore her death cannot be attributable. One of the main concerns is that it sets an extremely dangerous precedent. At what point should a mercy killing be allowed? Merely PVS? In PVS they essentially have no mental faculties whatsoever. What about someone suffering from a crippling wasting disease who lived everyday in immense pain and wished to die? Should their loved ones be able to take their life? What about people who perhaps do no have control of their mental state? Starvation is crude, yet natural. Unfortunately people in Terri's state would not notice how they died, so in this instance I don't really have a problem with it.

[slimfandango]

Starvation is the only way to do it really, as far as I can see, within the limits of 'public opinion'. By removing the feeding tube you are removing the last of the props you put in place to stop a natural process from killing her. The alternative is to kill her (whether masked behind the term 'paliative care' or not). And this is just not acceptable yet.