By all accounts, that would have been the easy thing for him to do if he hadn’t cared about Terri Schiavo. He could have just walked away and let his in-laws make all the decisions. Despite what Terri Schiavo’s parents tried to claim, it wasn’t about the money since all the insurance money went into her care. There was no gain for him if he stayed, only the negative publicity.
He seemed to love her and cared for her despite moving on with his life. He stayed with her so that he could honor her wishes and I don’t see anything despicable about that.
A feeding tube is medical treatment. It delivers nutrients directly to the stomach. A ventilator is also medical treatment.
These devices perform the function of organs which cannot function alone. You make it sound as though they were spoonfeeding her peas, or something.
Two of the five court-appointed neurologists who examined her testified that she was in a minimally conscious state, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Well, I guess you have to ask yourself what constitutes “life”. Be warned this is a difficult question philosophers have been grappling with for ages and to date there is no firm definition.
That said I think most of us would count being alive as being aware and experiencing the world. That is the important stuff.
Now, in some cases like Karen Ann Quinlan we might suppose she has an intact mind and might wake up someday. Or if she doesn’t she is still alive in a meaningful sense and dreaming. Near as science could tell this was not the case but a question mark remains.
In Terri’s case her brain was gone. Literally. Imagine your brain is gone and replaced with water. This, truly, was the case with Terri Schiavo (not water exactly but you get the idea). Here is a scan of her brain. See those dark areas? Liquid. Not brain, not kinda brain but liquid.
Wherever you may think the soul resides (if you believe in it) physically we live in our brain. It is the residence of our intellect and emotions and memories. Basically everything that makes you you.
Remove it and what is left? A shell. Your body is a life support system for your brain. No brain and you are left with the apparatus and nothing else.
All that was left to her was her brain stem which controls autonomic functions (breathing for instance). Her ability to perceive and be aware of the world was utterly gone. Even if we had technology to regrow a brain (we don’t) it’d be a new brain and new consciousness in Terri’s body…not Terri.
Terri was gone in every way that is meaningful. Her shell remained and perversely survived. It is creepy, it is wrong, there is no point in letting that shell continue. If you believe in a soul either it was gone when her brain died or it was a crime to leave it attached to her body which had not quite figured out it should be dead. If you do not believe in a soul then it is just plain creepy and a blot on people’s memory of her to leave her linger like that.
There was just no reason, whatsoever, to keep her on feeding tubes.
And putting a Band-Aid too.
I’ll rephrase; “A feeding tube is by no reasonable measure a desperate medical treatement that is needed to sustain life minute-by-minute”
It is much much closer to spoonfeeding than a ventilator.
Terri Schiavo was all but dead. Her body was banging along but why in the world would you want to animate an empty shell indefinitely? To what purpose? Her consciousness was gone. See my link above (and note that linked article includes a link to the actual autopsy report).
Band-Aids might promote cleaner healing but they are not life extending treatment.
Minute by minute? Obviously not. But they’re a long term treatment and they are a desperate measure - they’re used when someone is unconscious or when some part of his digestive system is too compromised to handle food for an extended period. That’s a pretty desperate situation even if it’s not going to be immediately lethal. Intubation is a surgical procedure. It’s not open heart surgery, but it does require the surgeons to stick a tube into your stomach through your belly. Gastric tubes are for people who cannot eat over for weeks or months. You might spoonfeed someone soup if he is too sick to keep a meal down that night. I don’t think they’re very similar in practice. There’s a continuum here but if your point of comparison is Band-Aids and spoonfeeding, you’re pushing too far. And if someone has requested no life-prolonging measures, I’m not sure why it matters if it’s like a Band-Aid or like a ventilator.
I would never betray my wife like you suggest Michael should have done, and I hope she would never betray me in this regard. There is no evidence that Michael was anything less than a loving husband who wanted to do right by Terri as he understood it. This was examined in the court cases, and while I felt sorry for Terri’s parents, it was right that Michael had the final say in the matter as her spouse.
But even if, as you suggest, he was immoral in not relinquishing control of Terri’s well being, it was wrong of those on the right to try to hijack the judicial process to force him to. This is what really bothers me. I, personally, would not assume to know whether or not he made the right decision; as Terri’s husband it was his decision to make and no one else’s. If her parents thought he was wrong and had nefarious motivation, well this is what the courts are for. Due process of law was observed and the courts found that was no reason to invalidate their marriage and his rights as her husband. When the Florida Legislature and the the US Legislature tried to pass laws to not only overturn 4 years of legal proceedings, but also to invalidate the sacred bond of marriage held by the Schiavos, I was disgusted and realized the party that claimed to embrace “limited government”, “personal freedom and responsibility”, “liberty above all else”, and Originalism had been hijacked by the worst sort of populists. Obviously YMMV.
That’s a matter of circumstance; the body metabolizes food over time, so it doesn’t require constant inputs of nutrients. The body metabolizes oxygen more or less instantly, and so it does require a constant flow of air.
If you remove the endotracheal tube or shut off the ventilator, the patient dies. If you remove the feeding tube, the patient dies.
That’s really for the individual in question to decide, not you. Why do you “dare” to try to insinuate yourself in other people’s end of life decisions? Why do you have the impression that it’s any of your business?
Wrong on both counts. It was voluntary (in the sense that she had already made a prior decision that she didn’t want to be kept alive that way), and she had expressed that wish to multiple people. Nobody was guessing. You don’t seem to be very informed about this case, or the issues involved.
She wasn’t unconscious, she was brain dead, and she wasn’t killed, she just rfused medical treatment.
Feeding tubes are medical treatment, yes, but in point of fact. People have the right to refuse food too, and they don’t need sanctimonious busybodies trying to stuff it into them against their will.
The spectacle was completely one-sided. That is a fact.
How did he “interfere?” All he did was make sure that HER ecision was respected. HER decision. HER decison.
Jesus Christ, the guy was a fucking sain, from what I read. Can you name one thing he ever did that was not in her best interst or in accorfdance with her wishes.
“Minute by minute” is not a criterion for what constitutes medical treatment. An invasive procedure to put a life sustaining device into the body is medical treatment.
The lesson I take from the suffering of the family is that if I cannot speak my mind, I want to be absolutely sure that no one with a degree in law, a license to practice law, or holding any government position, by election or appointment be allowed to make any decision about my life.
My brother, the doctor, has my authority to act, or direct action on my behalf for three days after I lose the ability to make my desires known. After that, no doctor of any sort has my authorization to treat me in any fashion for any reason. Take me home. Leave me alone. Do not save my life. It’s my life, and if God wants me to survive, He doesn’t need your help.
I sympathize with her parents. The emotions of this case run deep even among us who are not involved. But looking back it seems clear they were manipulated by those who had a political ax to grind. One Catholic priest struck me at the time as being especially sleazy.
But the underlying issue here was an is the sanctity of marriage. Like it or not, 18 minutes of her being a wife trumps eight years of her being your kid. Arguably that ought not to be the law, but it is the law and has long been so.
The parents and the government has little or no role in a case like this.
Unless it is an arranged marriage and the two meet on their wedding day chances are the couple has been dating and known each other for a long time.
My experience friends and especially significant-others have far more information and insight into a person than that person’s parents do. Consider all the things you confide to friends and especially girl/boy friends that you would never dream of telling your parents.
No doubt there are exceptions or loveless marriages and so on but in general your spouse knows you far better than your parents do…at least they should. Hell, my spouse (ex-spouse) in many ways knew me better than I knew myself.
Haven’t changed my mind. She should have been allowed to die then after the husband gave her up. Later autopsies showed that her brain was mush and she was completely vegetative, without a shred of thought unlike what Bill Frist, the video diagnostician, though
