Terri Schiavo Case to be Decided soon...

MadArchitect · Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2005 3:41 pm Post subject: Re: Update

At the very least, I wish they had ruled that she should be euthanized. Simply removing the feeding tube means that her death will entail starvation and hydration. Since there's some degree of uncertainty over whether or not she can feel, that method leaves over the possibility that she will, on some minimal level, suffer. I'm not certain about the ethics of allowing her to die at all, but I do feel that there is a clear ethical breach in ordering a death that is potentially painful rather than a death that is, in all likelihood, painless.

marti1900

Quote:
I have told my spouse I would want to be let go and would not want to be kept alive in a state like that.

I don't believe for a minute that when push comes to shove and you are in some hospital bed close to meeting The Answer To All Things that as your DW reaches to pull the plug, that you won't crawl back from the edge of The Great Abyss and put a bony claw on her arm and wheeze "I'm not ready! Not yet!" You are too feisty to let go that easily, despite any MB words you may type in your ruddy good health! LOL

And when your DW responds, "But, dear, you SAID you didn't want to live like this.", you will answer back, "I CHANGED MY MIND!!!!!!"

I go to many different types of MB's, and this case is being discussed heatedly everywhere, and most of the sentiment seems to come down against the husband, I think because he is living with another woman and has 2 kids with the OW, all the while claiming he cannot divorce poor Terri because of his religion. So the general feeling is that he wants to Get Rid of Terri without offending the Church so he can marry the OW.

Talk about your convoluted rationales for Getting Rid of the Inconvenience.

Marti in Mexico

Mr. Pessimistic

Well gee...between you and Mad, I seem not to know anything I think I do...

You analysis makes no sense to me. If his intention was to marry again, and if indeed he is hooked up, why would he need her dead? He has been given the opportunity to leave this, but stuck around for all these years...why?
There is no money involved, so why?

And he is INDEED offending the church in pursuit of what he feels or remembers as Terri's wishes...so am I to accept that divorce would be worse as opposed to what he is trying to do for Terri? It is easy to vilify the person who seems wrong, but I find in cases like this, it is the person who is stigmatized that is the only one acting rationally.

Let's not even get into why I think Dr. Kevorkian's methods are a good idea.

The thing is...Terri cannot put her "boney claw" on anything voluntarily. If she could, I would not be having this discussion, for she would be able to speak, or make her wishes known.

No one knows for sure if Mr. Schiavo is acting on what Terri's wishes were, but I am willing, considering my points, to give him the benefit of the doubt. And anyway...the spouse is next of kin by our laws! I hear a Republican say yesterday (Luger maybe?...not sure) that he dose not CARE what her husband says...and these are the same people trying to protect the sanctity of marriage with a constitutional amendment? Oh...that is just so they can bash dem fucking fags legal like, I see...

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

I came to get down, I came to get down. So get out ya seat and jump around - House of Pain

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Mr. Pessimistic

Quote:
If the state of Florida had not acted, Terri Schiavo would soon be dead. She would have died because liberal secularists value death over life...

Secularists often celebrate death...

we would descend to the level of animals. Which might be the goal of the liberal secularists in the first place.

Ignorant Bastard's Article

This is the kind of bullshit that makes me to value conservative/fundamentalist death over life. Ignorant. Emotionally charged ignorance.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

I came to get down, I came to get down. So get out ya seat and jump around - House of Pain

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Ken Hemingway

It's curious that all the press comment seems to treat this as some kind of "right to life" case. But it's really not. It is estimated (no data are kept) that several thousand people per year have a feeding tube removed because they are in a "persistent vegetative state". So why is this case controversial? Well, because there is a dispute between the husband and the parents about who has the right to make the determination. This is really a case about marital vs. parental rights to act on behalf of a totally incapacitated person.

My understanding is that in most cases parents have almost no rights with respect to an adult married child.

Mr. Pessimistic

Right...Marriage gives the next of kin status to the spouse. Which, IMHO, makes sense.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

I came to get down, I came to get down. So get out ya seat and jump around - House of Pain

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Loricat

The idea that the spouse is next of kin is one of the main arguments for gay marriage -- because you would hope that a surviving partner would not have to fight the family for the partnership's children or assets.

L

"All beings are the owners of their deeds, the heirs to their deeds."

Chris OConnor

This thread was moved from the Religion, Philosophy & the Arts forum to the Politics, Current Events & History forum.

Chris

MadArchitect

One thing that has been interesting to observe in all of this is how little people are capable of addressing the ethical and legal implications of the case apart from their emotional responses to it. You can hear it in the adjectives they use -- a friend said, "Why don't they just let that poor woman die?" People are angry, and angry people form solid opinions quickly and with very little recourse to a second opinion. I'm not sure how we can achieve any sort of clarity on a matter as things stand.

In some ways, it reminds me of the O.J. Simpson trial. Everyone seemed to have their own opinion as to whether or not he murdered Nicole Simpson. But if you dug deeply enough, it quickly became clear that their opinions generally weren't founded on any real preponderance of the evidence -- what evidence was available -- but rather on an emotional response. People were angry, either at the smugness of a celebrity who thought he could get away with murder, at a law enforcement system that seemed deadset on counteracting the success of a black man, or (if we admit that some people, even those we recognize as "good people", are sometimes prone to the worst thoughts) at a black man for killing his white wife. That these reasons for outrage were almost always founded on assumption rather than any real knowledge of the case was beside the point -- people needed a firm foundation on which to base their opinion, and these reasons served well enough. It always bothered me, how many people could give you a definite answer, "of course he did it" or "hell no he didn't." There were times when I would kissed a person on the spot if they had merely admitted that they didn't know.

The Schiavo case is a little more worrisome, though. We're no longer talking about the consequences of a death that has already taken place, but of whether or not to allow a death. I'm all for an emotional response to events, and the deadening of emotional affect is one of those tendencies in our culture that I think we should struggle against. I am not so sure that it should play such a heavy role in determining law or ethics.

jjacobs43

With all of the speculation about about the husband's motives in all this there is definately a similiarity to something like the OJ trial. But it's different in the sense that you don't really need to know all of the facts about the husband to have an opinion on the case. Whatever the husband's role and his motiviations, the fact is, this is a woman who has no chance of recovery based on any real medical opinions. I've never met a person that would want to be artifically kept alive like that. In my shoes, I'd want my spouse to be able to make the decision - I entrusted my life to this person when I married her. Removing emotion from the equation, you have to come to the conclusion that the husband should make the call - for the greater good of our freedoms.

MadArchitect

From a strictly legal standpoint, I'm not sure that the husband's apparant motivation should play any part, be it good or bad. Precedence is a concern, although, this particular case isn't necessarily in danger of sstting the precedent. The very fact that, in the absence of a living will, a spouse could end life support for the wrong reason, without any form of check placed upon that power, should be reason enough to suspend judgement.

I have no doubt that most married people in this forum have enough trust in their spouses to feel confident that their wishes would be carried out in just such an instance, and that doubt is, in all likelihood, well warranted. But to make it law would be to put the liberties of millions of less fortunate spouses in jeopardy. You can bet that there are people who would pull the plug on their own spouse in order to save themselves some money or facilitate a second marriage or for any other selfish reason you can imagine. It's easy enough to say that no one should stay married to such a person, but the evidence of social work suggests that it's a fuzzier line than many people would believe. And it may be an extreme minority that would want to be kept on life support even in the most extreme of debilitating circumstances. But if we're going to treat seriously their will in such a case, we have to protect even the minority cases, right?

Which isn't to say that we should necessarily respect their will. I'm open to arguments with the bottom line that anyone reduced to a certain state with no chance of recovery should be treated according to policy, as though their probable will in the case is nulified by their current state. I don't necessarily incline towards that viewpoint, and I think it raises some rather sticky questions, but I'd happily listen to anyone who could argue it well.

But the consensus in this forum seems to be that Terri Schiavo's probable will, and the probable wills of others in similar situations, should be respected. Fair enough, I'm just not convinced that the state has any reason to believe that the spouse is uniformly the best person to speak on their behalf.

Mr. Pessimistic

Mad: I will address your response soon.

I just read this article. This one thing stood out.

Quote:
Mary Schindler's recollection of what her daughter wanted was different. She testified that Terri had commented on news coverage of the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, whose ventilator was turned off in 1976 after her parents went to the New Jersey Supreme Court. Schindler said her daughter told her this about Quinlan: "Just leave her alone. Leave her. If they take her off, she might die. Just leave her alone and she will die whenever."

Link to story

Terri Schiavo was 13 years old in 1976. Maybe she said this at the time...but is it not possible that a 13 year old's views may change over the course of 14 years? (Terri was stricken with this condition in 1990).

Just food for thought.

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

Mr. Pessimistic

Quote:

WASHINGTON - A week after their unprecedented intervention in the Terri Schiavo case, Republican congressional leaders find themselves in a moral and political thicket, having advanced the cause as a right-to-life issue — only to confront polls showing that the public does not see it that way.

...

"Advocates of using federal power to keep this woman alive need to seriously study the polling data that's come out on this," said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform, who has been talking to both social and economic conservatives about the fallout. "I think that a lot of conservative leaders assumed there was broader support for saying that they wanted to have the federal government save this woman's life."

Public reaction to lawmakers a surprise

They keep shooting, they are going to hit their foot sooner or later!

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper

MadArchitect

Here's an link leading to most of the case documents concerning Schiavo. I haven't had a chance to look through many of them yet, but I thought you guys might find it useful:
news.findlaw.com/legalnews/lit/schiavo/index.html

Mr. Pessimistic

Thanks Mad...my main goal is to provide any info I come across, so I appreciate your input!

Mr. P.

The one thing of which I am positive is that there is much of which to be negative - Mr. P.

The pain in hell has two sides. The kind you can touch with your hand; the kind you can feel in your heart...Scorsese's "Mean Streets"

HEY! Is that a ball in your court? - Mr. P

I came to kick ass and chew Bubble Gum...and I am all out of Bubble Gum - They Live, Roddy Piper


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