It is compensation for the lack of rumpy pumpy with your spouse.
As in consorting.
With a consort.
I think what you’ve said is the closest phrasing (if not th eintention) I’ve seen to expressing my position. I’m sure Terry Schiavo’s life was pretty tenously on this side of death and that accepting her death would be the best. It is the slow, torturous (even if she didn’t feel pain) method by which she died that really gets me.
If she’d died minutes after the removal of the tubes I could have accepted that she was artificially being kept alive. But it took days for her to die (or her body to stop functioning).
Well, so what? One of the benefits of being in a persistent vegetative state is that she wasn’t actually conscious.
You mean sweaty snugglebunnies?
WHAT.THE.FUCK? GOD, I have NEVER EVER seen such an in-denial mom! It’s almost like she thought her wittle Faithy was a dolly! How did I know without even clicking on it, that Myah (LOVE the brainless TrEnDy spelling) was an evalingcal Chirstian? Ten bucks says she lives in a trailer park and is basicly a Sheldon’s mom type.
THAT is extreme even for pro lifers. I know plenty of pro lifers who would be OK with a theraputic abortion b/c it’s basicly turning off life support on someone who is profoundly terminally ill.
And I can’t believe I’ve never heard of the Baby K case. I’m a news junkie, and was around and regularly reading the papers as a kid.
Gosh that is sad.
What ever happened to the two families? Perhaps we can determine the ‘true’ motives of the parties by looking at their behavior in the last five years.
I told you not to look. You shouldn’t have looked.
(snipped )
I still maintain that a person’s will should not be forced on me. I will, as with everything else, use my good conscience.
Absoulutely agreed. They all either specifically know or should clearly get a big hint if your relative is a conservative catholic.
You would be directly and specifically causing the death. That’s a no-no in my book. I understand she didn’t (almost with complete certainty) feel pain.
(I know that’s not what you’re saying) It would be dangerous to make it a rule that “anything goes” with unconscious people.
To me, this is really hair-splitting. Taking out a feeding tube will cause death, but so will refusing medical treatment or surgery. Is it that important that you be able to tell yourself “the disease killed her, we just stood around and didn’t stop it” instead of “we didn’t keep her alive any longer?”
Again, nobody has said that’s the case, and it’s not implied or suggested by anything that happened to this woman. Or by anybody’s comments in this thread as far as I can tell.
Is not about confortimg myself, it’s about what think is right. I know this is a pretty tough case (if it weren’t we wouldn’t be discussing it).
Still, removing the feeding tube is the cause of death, not the disease. Removing anyone’s feeding tube kills them. Ms. Schiavo’s degree of conscoiusness, pain and suffering could be minimal or zero, still, her body was functioning without external help.
Still, if the strength of the case lies on her not feeling pain, you could/might get there, even if nobody’s proposed it here.
How, precisely, do you consider a feeding tube - which requires a surgical procedure to be inserted - as “without external help”?
Right. But my point is that your distinction between what’s right and what’s wrong in this situation looks like hair-splitting to me.
Yes, it’s tough. But nobody’s claimed she was terminal. They’ve said she was being kept alive by this tube, which she was, and that she’d expressed a wish not to be kept alive by these kinds of artificial means, which it appears she did. I don’t see why it matters that the cause of death was removing the feeding tube instead of, say, letting a tumor grow out of control or a heart or lung shut down. When someone requests that no life-saving or extending measures be taken, that means all measures unless they say otherwise.
Certainly. I’m just saying that in this specific instance her degree of suffering is pretty much immaterial because she had no higher brain function anyway.
Removing my feeding tube (if one had been inserted) wouldn’t kill me. Removing yours wouldn’t either.
I think you have this impression of a feeding tube as a device that pumps food into the mouth, where the patient swallows it. It isn’t. Food is pumped directly into the stomach, which functions without conscious effort. We’re not talking about somebody who couldn’t feed herself because she had no motor control; we’re talking about somebody who couldn’t even ingest food, and wouldn’t have even if she could.
Sorta like watering a plant.
I’ve a question; what would you say about the opposite situation? That is to say, imagine a situation wherein you have within your power the ability to save someone from death. In the first case, you personally act to kill a person. In the second, you are not acting to cause death, but rather, through your inaction that person’s death will occur.
Are you, as the active killer in one, and the inactive killer in the other, equally bad in your book? Are action causing an event and inaction allowing an event to happen similar?
Yeah, not a great choice of words. I meant that her body (kungs, heart, pancreas) don’t need to helped to perform their works (à la ventilator).
I can’t deny a certain hair-splittingness in my argument. It’s they greyest area.
I’m afraid I can’t make myself clearer on this subject, I’ve gone as far as I can. Her wishes are hers and the duty to carry them or not was on others’ shoulders.
You have the wrong impression. But this means that a quadraplegic whio also can’t move his jaw and tongue would be in the same position. She was being fed. Her stomach and intestines processed food in the same way yours and mine do.
No, the hypothetical quadriplegic is a totally different scenario. He knows he needs to eat, and would actively seek out food, however he was able.
Schiavo didn’t know anything, and would not (and did not) seek food, or even understand what food was.
that wasn’t the issue. The issue was the mechanics of her feeding. The fully conscious quadraplegic would die.
There is no dispute, of course, on the very different levels of consciousness.