And yet, what is life without conciousness, without a brain, really?
The fundamental difference here is that you think that it’s okay to keep someone artificially alive against their will if medical technology can accomplish such, whereas the rest of us realize that there is no purpose for that and it’s distasteful to do so.
What I don’t understand is why someone who believes so strongly in God and an afterlife would want to actively prevent someone from moving on when it is unambiguously clear that there is no further life beyond a basic biological existence is possible.
Because the belief has nothing to do with the wellbeing of the person in the hospital bed, and everything to do with the people watching. It’s OK to stand by and watch someone suffer when you can prevent it, even to watch them die. Just don’t be the person who takes the action that causes the death.
Thou shalt not kill, but needst not strive officiously to keep alive.
Things like this make me want to cry. We put dogs down when they are in too much pain! Yet we can’t give the same thing to humans. How is this moral? How is this valuing human life over animal life?
We must understand that a time comes when life is over. This preoccupation with living, living, even under the direst of conditions, even againt the person’s wishes, is nothing less than downright cruelty.
And yes I absolutely hate the way we have to let people die instead of just killing them humanely (see that word?) But it’s better than nothing.
If this case were simple, there would’ve been no debate 5 years ago or now. I myself can see this case as one of those were even my clear beliefs can be inadecuate or even wrong; I don’t think so, but it may be the case.
I still think that she was “too alive” for her being let go that way.
That is, at least in my case, incorrect.
It’s got nothing to do with us, it’s got to do with deciding whether an action kills or simply lets death take its course.
You say “suffer” even though the majority here say she had no consciousness or didn’t feel pain. If she’d ben in pain and the drug the alleviate the pain would hasten the death (not causing it), it would’ve been OK.
We put down animals for reasons we wouldn’t even consider doing with serial child-rapists/murderers. We kill the animals becasue they are not human, they are entirely disposable.
When life is over, it is over. When death comes as the result of lack of nourishment for several days, death wasn’t that close.
Did she feel pain or not? I can’t argue agaisnt both sides simultaneoulsy.
Was she suffering? In agony?
When saying suffer I was not discussing this individual case - just the ridiculous moral code that finds it ethical to watch a person die in agony, unable to be helped by pain killers, raher than get one’s own hands dirty by helping them to die.
It’s a moral cop out, and it is only about the onlooker, and nothing to do with the patient (or, in this case, the brain dead patient).
30 years ago, she wouldn’t have been able to have a PEG tube, as they didn’t exist. So it’s not like this is some natural process that was circumvented.
Nasogastric tubes have been around for a lot longer. They’re also much more unpleasant and cause more problems. But again, it’s not like that is a natural process either.
Without those external interventions, she would have died of starvation many years ago.
She required medical support to live. They withdrew the medical support, just like taking her off of a ventilator.
And don’t try to give me your “but this means you can kill paraplegics” garbage, either. My mother is hemiparaplegic, and used a PEG tube for several years. Not one time did anyone ever even hint at anything like that. You’re being ridiculous.
The case was simple. The surrounding emotional issues, particularly the inability of her parents to understand the real situation, were not. This case made headlines because of the emotional issues, not the medical ones.
Since I specifically said in the qoute you yourself are citing that I support the use of painkillers even if they hasten death, I don’t get your response.
100 years ago there were almost no vaccines.
Comparing a ventilator to a fedding tube is comparing setting broken bones with a band-aid.
I’m done with this debate, I have explained my reasons, I can’t do better.
We’re just flogging the dirt that used to be beneath the horse.
You keep saying that and there should be no debate anymore given the findings of the autopsy. But you have this peculiar notion that it’s moral to keep the machine running when the person is long dead. I guess. Is that what you’re saying? What part of Terri was still left? Clearly her brain, everything that was Terri’s personality was gone. There was only enough working brain left to continue to operate the organs…and not even all of them. She had no visual sensory information, she couldn’t communicate, she showed no evidence of awareness and had little to no brain matter to support awareness.
Without awareness, without the ability to communicate, what kind of life is that? It’s strictly biological. What made her “too alive”? Her heart beat? It’s a pump; that’s what a healthy heart does. But without a brain, what’s the point of keeping that heart pumping artificially? It does no good for anyone and is disgusting to quite a few people who wouldn’t want to end up in the same situation. What are we? Puppets for the living? Thanks, but no thanks.
And what’s the legal justification for this? Ají de Gallina said:
The distinction is one of purely mechanism - the metabolic rate differences between the two processes. Breathing is a fast turnover process, and a lack of breathing quickly removes necessary parts of the chemistry. Oxygen is cut off, can’t get to cells to keep them running. Digestion is a slow metabolic process, and so is dehydration. It takes time for the body to process. First off, the water in the blood already is available for use. The body has processes to retain water if losing too much, so those kick in. Then the water in the cells gets pulled into the bloodstream. All of that provides a reservoir of resources that takes time to lead to terminal results.
But it is the same thing - a shortage of a necessary resource means the body can no longer function, so it ceases. In both cases it is external activity that supplies the necessary resource and that external activity is removed, allowing natural processes to continue without interruption. The natural process for not breathing is that the brain stem stops signalling the heart rhythym. Heart stops. The natural process for not drinking is that the body loses water until there is not enough for the tissues to do their job, and organs fail. The difference is due to different metabolic rates for those processes, not due to any inherent difference in the kind of aid.
I suppose the intuitive sense of seeing the machine removal instantly change the patient’s status gives an emotional experience difference, but the reality is it is the same.
Ají de Gallina said:
I can come up with hypotheticals for each side of the situation. Compelling you to violate your morality to satisfy his desires is tricky business. As I said, it is in the best interest of both parties that they be aware of the areas where they agree and disagree, and if those areas of disagreement pose significant possibility of complication, then enact legal means to ensure the situation will not arise.
I accept that. I understand that there is some justification for a moral distinction between taking an action that has an outcome and not taking an action to prevent that same outcome. In this particular case, though, the end result was a given. The only difference was how much additional turbulence to induce on the body to achieve the result, and what watching that experience would mean to the family members.
Plus, from my perspective, Terry was essentially already dead. Her body was functioning, but her identity was gone - irretreivable. Terminating the body is much different than killing a person. There was no person left there to kill, merely some left over cells that hadn’t stopped working. If a person had an arm amputated (say in an accident) such that it couldn’t be reattached, the cells would still be alive for some time after that accident and the blood stopped flowing. Cells would start dying, but not all die at the same time - it would be a process. If reattaching the arm were not possible, I see no distinction in running the leftover arm through a grinder or pitching it into an incinerator even though some of the cells may still be alive.
I suppose the next question might be if I see no distinction, why do I care what happened to her body? Because people would watch the body waste away, because it draws out the inevitable and makes the family suffer. Everyone get together, do whatever final goodbyes you feel compelled to do, then induce a rapid cessation of bodily function. Then begin the grieving and healing.
Which is quite different from situations where it does make a difference, where the patient involved is not brain-dead, but alive and even conscious, but suffering. In those cases I more strongly recommend making the end quick rather than drawn out and adding to the suffering. But that is a different topic, not Terry Schiavo.
Marley23 said:
Well, technically, I claim she was already dead - at least as much as matters. The continued beating of her heart and functioning of her lungs was not an indicator of the significant part of life.
But ignoring that, “terminal” is an ambiguous description. She couldn’t feed herself, so she was terminal. Same way a person on a ventilator can’t breathe for herself, so is terminal. Or a person on a heart bypass machine is terminal if the machine is turned off. A gunshot victim with a gaping, bleeding hole is well on the way to terminal. The whole point of medical intervention is that without it the patient is severely in trouble. Sometimes the medical intervention can cure that terminality - stitching up the hole, or restarting the heart, or giving chemo to kill off cancer cells. Sometimes that intervention just delays the effect for a while - ventilator for lungs that can’t recover, dialysis for kidney failure, etc. If the intervention is sustainable, then it can be continued indefinitely until another situation causes death.
Ají de Gallina said:
But her mouth needed help to perform it’s job (eating).
In one sense, you are correct, a quadraplegic who cannot serve food to himself would be in a similar situation. Some sort of external feeding is required, or he would be terminal. The difference is a significant one - that there would be a person there to experience that feeding or lack of feeding, that there would be a consciousness to experience the life.
Really Not All That Bright said:
Even if the best he could manage was signalling to his caretakers “hungry”. Ají de Gallina said:
I agree, but disagree that the significant factor is the mechanics. I think the significant factor is the results of what that feeding accomplishes. Keeping a conscious person alive to continue to have some semblance of experiences is different than keeping a hollow shell biologically functioning.
I don’t think she was alive enough for it to matter, I just think it distasteful to draw out the inevitable for no gain.
In what way is it not letting death take its course to withdraw the feeding tube and let her body figure out feeding itself?
And I think people are discussing different situations, both the specifics of Terry Schiavo, and more general cases where the person is in a different condition. Any confusion is probably due to juxtaposing thoughts about the different situations.
Some people would argue with the entirely disposable argument - many people put down their pets as a humane approach rather than letting the illness run its course in a slow, painful manner. You are correct that there is a difference in attitude with regards to how much resources/expenditure to put into pet care vs. human care, and animals are definitely worth less than humans. But the example in question is one where people are motivated by relieving suffering. Those two situations have some equivalence, and we’re far more likely to accept easing an animal’s death than easing a human’s.
Totally ridiculous. Comparing a ventilator with a feeding tube is like comparing setting a broken bone with stitching up a severed artery.
And by the way, nobody has mentioned yet the waste of organs in letting her go this way. Her body functioning was exactly the ideal conditions for harvesting donor organs like heart and lungs. I’m not sure the condition of her kidneys and liver, but I presume they weren’t in bad shape or she’d have been on dialysis, etc. The fact she lasted 15 years suggests her organs were okay. This is the type of situation that doctors look for in ER patients. No helmet motorcycle crashes are called “donor cycles” because the accidents scramble the brains and leave the other organs running.
Somebody probably will be offended by what I just said.
It’s an obvious damage, and it’s been actionable as an element of damages at common law for several hundred years. In some (US) jurisdictions, it’s written into the statutes as a separate cause of action.
I’m pretty sure it originally referred to actual economic damages, rather than sexy time - ie., losing your wife meant losing your housekeeper, and as such you’d be entitled to damages equal to the cost of hiring a new one.
Depending on the jurisdiction I think children can also cite loss of parental consortium (ie., love, affection, hugs, whatever) as a damage in a wrongful death suit.
I’m not a doctor, but that’s not my understanding of what ‘terminal’ means. It’s true she probably could have remained just as she was in that hospital bed for many more years, but she said she didn’t want her life [for lack of a better word] to be prolonged indefinitely by artificial means, and that would include a feeding tube. So I was saying the distinction Ají de Gallina was making - 'she was killed by the removal of the tube, not by a disease - is technically true. But given what we know about her wishes (or really, the wishes of anyone else in a similar situation), it’s a distinction without a difference as far as I’m concerned.
Not serial killers. NOT serial killers! Us! Me! You! I do not ever want to live like that and I would expect my husband to do what I wanted him to do. I would never trust my parents to make that decision for me. I know they might choose the other way.
I don’t care about serial killers. I, ME, I want as much consideration and loving care as we give to dogs. Not forced to remain alive long after I want to die.
I also want to be able to live my life to the length of it - I don’t want to only have the right to die when I am in great pain! Say I reach the ripe old age of 95 and think “That’s enough”. I have to continue living on this earth whether I want to or not. I have no recourse to gently go into that good night while I still have my dignity and resources around me.
That is what I protest, and that is what I feel as emotional about this issue as you do. Lying in a hospital with no brain while people poke at my body and expose bits of me I never wanted exposed on TV and making me into a national spectacle - that’s pretty much one definition of Hell.
I remember 5 years ago. What I saw in the news, on television, and here, was not debate, it was a circus.
Terri’s parents were attention whores, publicity whores. The polticians were the same.
It was a freak show, and it wan’t Terri that was the freak. It was all those otherws who USED her for their own purposes.
While I agree we’re not discussing serial killers, I think you missed the point.
We all agree serial killers are low on the status of human worth. Yet even when we agree to execute them (which not everybody does agree), we have pushed for humane means of execution. Ají’s point is that the worst humans are regarded better than the best animals, our pets. He is saying that pets are regarded as disposable, which is arguable.
Your position is that we treat our pets that we love with care and affection and if they are suffering and there’s no real cure or treatment, then we lovingly end their pain rather than drag out their suffering.
Good grief! When are you going to accept the simple fact–FACT!–that the woman’s brain was gone? Just because you want to believe that there’s some ethereal portion of the brain that’s never been proven to exist does not make it possible that the woman’s dissolved brain was still functioning in any meaningful sense of the word.
The case you’re talking about was about a woman whose brain was still there. That was not the case with Schiavo. Hers was dissolved.