The upcoming campus visit (tomorrow, April 8th, Frist 302, 7:30 pm if anyone is interested) of Terri Schiavo’s brother, Bobby Schindler, has gotten me thinking again about the issue of euthanasia, or mercy killing, and whose decision it should be. I’m sure you all remember the epic battle between Terri Schiavo’s husband, Michael, and her parents over her life. Eventually, Michael won the right to remove Terri’s feeding tube and she died in March 2005, after spending over ten years in a “persistent vegetative state.”
Many of the articles I have come across online characterize Terri’s death as “horrific” and indicate that she was “cruelly starved to death and dehydrated.” There is no doubt that Terri died from lack of food and water, as she was able to survive without any help beyond a feeding tube. The controversy lies in whether or not her death was “cruel.” Because Terri did not leave a living will, her loved ones bickered over whether or not she would have wanted to die based on vague recollections of things she had said. For me, personally, I remember how much it sucked to be stuck on the couch for a week after I had my appendix out, effectively not being able to feed myself because I couldn’t get up, and I can be sure that I would not want to live in a persistent vegetative state, so brain damaged that I was not aware of my own existence.
I believe that severely brain damaged people are not alive anymore in the sense that they are of course living because their organs are functioning, but they no longer possess that which makes them truly human. I do not particularly believe in souls per se, but I feel that every person attains personhood through having a mind that can think and learn and create new ideas in and of itself. If someone’s mind is dead, they are no longer alive.
From there, the decision between life and death could have been left in the hands of either her biological family or her husband. Because Michael Schiavo had already moved on to a new life and had children with another woman, I do not think he should have been the one to make the decision regarding Terri’s future. Terri’s family was willing to pay all medical expenses to keep Terri alive, so she would not have been a burden to Michael in any way. I definitely believe that Terri was already dead in the most crucial sense of the word and I think that removing her feeding tube was the right decision for Michael to make. However, I also think that it may have been better for her family to make that final decision because they still had a strong emotional attachment to Terri and were willing to take care of her as necessary. Who are we to dictate what someone else’s family should do in that instance?
Overall, I think that this was an incredibly difficult decision and Terri’s case was incredibly unfortunate and of course everyone would have been better off if Terri had either died on the day she fell ill, or had never fallen into her vegetative state in the first place. I think that Terri’s parents should have been able to make the decision regarding her future as they had a more vested interest in her well being as Michael had already separated himself from Terri significantly. However, as the right to make a decision was given to Michael, I believe that he did make an appropriate decision.
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff040308.php3
http://www.princeton.edu/~soapbox/vol2no4/24murray.html
http://www.princeton.edu/~paw/archive_new/PAW05-06/09-0308/notebook.html
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2 comments:
While I agree with your differentiation between what should be considered “alive” and “dead,” I just wanted to comment on the characterization of Terry’s death. While Terry died from lack of food and water, I would argue that there is no legitimate way to justify the characterization of her death as “horrific,” because there is in no way to fully determine the capacity of her brain function. She was characterized as being in a vegetative state, but the key point is that we are not fully aware of what it means to be in a vegetative state. Can patients feel? Can they think? Many physicians believe that patients in vegetative states have lost all brain function, and therefore cannot think and cannot feel; however, there is no way that we can be sure of that. Given the fact that we cannot be completely sure about whether or not vegetative patients can feel or not, we cannot characterize their deaths in either way. When individuals die in their sleep from old age, we consider that a pleasant death because they supposedly do not feel any pain. If the experience of pain is what differentiates pleasant deaths from horrific deaths, we should not characterize Terry’s death in either way, for we are unsure of whether or not she retained the ability to register pain.
Furthermore, although Michael has “moved on” in the sense that he had children with another woman, we cannot use this as reasoning for why Terry’s parents should have been the ones to decide whether or not Terry lived. We cannot accurately judge “how much” Michael cared for Terry. If your dog was seriously ill and staying with your veterinarian, and in the meantime you adopted a second dog, does that mean you love your first dog any less? Bringing it up to the scale of humans: When we go off to college, we are “removed” in a sense from our parents. There are some students that do not phone home at all, or cannot visit their parents as they are international students and returning home is costly and inefficient. Does this mean that they love their parents any less, even though they have “moved on” in a sense from their lives at home? In either way, I would disagree with the justification why Michael should not have been the one in charge of the decision; however, seeing this as a practical case and not a theoretical one, I ultimately would agree with your conclusion that the parents should have been given the right to decide when to remove Terry’s feeding tube.
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