Posted on 04/03/2005 2:09:33 PM PDT by FairOpinion
The arguments surrounding Terri Schiavo will live on in statehouse debate and new laws if an emerging coalition of disability rights activists and right-to-lifers succeeds in turning the national agony over her case into a re-examination of when and how our lives come to an end.
So far, only a few legislators in a handful of states have sought significant changes to their laws, which define the fundamental elements at stake - how a person can set limits on their medical care, who gets to decide what their wishes are, what evidence is needed to prove it.
None have yet become law and the chances for most, if not all, are slim this year, with some legislatures finished and many far along in their work for this session. But both Republicans and Democrats say the arguments aren't going away.
The debate is an effort to strike a new balance between one stance that argues that medical care and morality mean life must be pursued in nearly all cases, and another stance, crafted over decades of changing views about death, that some may choose to end drastically damaged lives that depend on artificial means.
"I really wanted to make sure we gave a default for life and not for death," said Kansas state Rep. Mary Pilcher-Cook, a Republican who helped revive a measure that would give courts a greater chance to review decisions to end life-sustaining care, lessening the role of guardians or doctors. "Our most vulnerable citizens are in fact in the most danger of losing their life without any recourse."
She was joined in her effort by disability activists, many aligned with liberal causes, and Democrats in the state House. The measure stalled in the Kansas Senate, however, as the session ended for the year last Friday.
"We don't want to get into the politics of the right or the left or whomever," said Michael Donnelly at the Disability Rights Center of Kansas. "This isn't about politics, this is about how we value or don't value the lives people with disabilities have."
His group had been working for years to revisit the issue, and came together with several conservative legislators to move the bill forward. Elsewhere, the National Right to Life Committee has produced model legislation and is working with legislators in several states.
Legislation has also been introduced in Alabama, Hawaii, Louisiana, Minnesota and South Dakota. The Louisiana bill is called the "Human Dignity Act"; Alabama's is the "Starvation and Dehydration Prevention Act."
Many measures predate recent weeks of attention to Schiavo, though some drew their inspiration directly from the agonized public debate over the 41-year-old woman's death - like one in Missouri introduced last Thursday, the day Schiavo died.
"I was gripped by what I was watching and couldn't believe the state of Florida would let this woman die in this manner," said GOP state Rep. Cynthia Davis. Her bill would bar anyone from directing that artificial food and water be withheld or withdrawn without a specific written directive from the patient.
There's also a slew of legislation around living wills and other end-of-life issues that wouldn't further the aims of this emerging group - like a Nevada measure that would let a guardian end life-sustaining measures even if it's against a patient's known wishes, as long as it's in their best interests.
The views of medical care and ending life have shifted over the past 30 years as the country grappled with brain-damaged or coma-bound patients whose families said they shouldn't be forced to live a life they wouldn't want, starting with Karen Ann Quinlan in 1975, then to Nancy Cruzan in 1990 and now to Schiavo.
Critics say the medical community and society have gone too far. "When original advance directives were created, nobody contemplated that hospitals would refuse to treat ... It was usually just the opposite, doctors refusing to pull the feeding tube," said Burke Balch, director of the National Right to Life Committee's medical ethics center.
Now, he says, the presumption in the hospitals, the courts and in too much state legislation, is to go ahead and pull life-sustaining treatment when there is not enough evidence that the patient wanted it.
Doctors and bioethicists say that overwhelmingly, safeguards exist in hospitals and in courts to ensure that patients' and families' wishes and best interests are protected.
"Are they going to go out and undo all the hard work that people have done to make sure they can die without having to go to court?" said Dr. Jean Teno, associate director at Brown University's Gerontology and Health Care Research Center.
Most decisions, unlike the portrayal of critics, are made by doctors and families working together, she said. "My sense is that this approach is working."
Political agendas are hard to discount, as congressional leaders raise dire warnings against judges in Florida and Washington over their Schiavo decisions. That meshes with GOP efforts to put more conservatives in the judiciary.
But political stereotypes fell, too, with traditionally liberal leaders like Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader supporting Terri Schiavo's parents efforts to keep their daughter alive.
Advocates vow that the questions of civil rights and morality are going to win out.
"If there's any doubt, than life trumps death," said Donnelly, in Kansas. "I'm a quadriplegic, been that way for 28 years. I would hate for somebody else to decide my life is not worth living."
If you ever reached a point in your life where you were dying of a painful, inoperable condition such as pancreatic cancer, you would be singing a different tune.
It's easy to make such bold statement when you are hale and hearty.
You do not understand. If you want to end your life by purposeful act, it is presumed that you are incompetent.
If you threaten the life of another, you are a threat to his right not to be killed, showing your lack of rationality further.
You also do not indicate that you understand the difference between acts carried out by government and regulated persons such as doctors and individual, private acts. While government will rightly intervene if you are about to commit suicide in a public manner, goverment cannot prevent you if you are truly in private. Neither will you be charged with a crime. You will be presumed to be insane and incompetent.
One thing I know for sure: I would NEVER want to be dehydrated/starved to death. NEVER! UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES!!! Terri was put through hell.
I claim it as a basic inalienable right of man, without regard to constitution or law.
You have the inalienable right to life and liberty, which includes the right not to be assaulted by unwanted intervention and invasion of your body.
I have it now, but those in the 'right to life' community are trying to take it away, and make all life support measures mandatory.
What you do not have is the right to call on laws, government guns and regulated technology to cause your death.
I deny the government's right to regulate/prohibit technology/materials I might need for my death or to help a loved one die.
They can prosecute my corpse.
If someday they seek to prosecute me for helping a loved one out of a bad spot, then I will be doomed and might as well plan to take as many 'right to life/pain' people with me as I can.
So9
here is an interesting if somewhat flippantly written answer to your question
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040326.html
You are mixing the diagnosis of PVS (which is misdiagnosed in about 40% of cases) with the purposeful killing of a patient. That is rare in hospice in the US, regardless of what you've read from those in favor of killing Terri Schiavo.
If you were in the state that TS was in, you would not have cared nor known that you were being dehydrated.
Terri fought like heck! And she suffered. Why did they give her morphine if she didn't care or didn't know anything? Why were they playing music? Why did they give her a stuffed animal? This is ghoulish! You have to believe Terri was not a human being or else you could not justify killing her in such a heinous fashion.
I deny that and will resist confinement very violently.
If you threaten the life of another, you are a threat to his right not to be killed, showing your lack of rationality further.
I refer to helping a friend or relative out of this world in accordance with their expressed written instructions in the event they are not able to help themselves.
I may be irrational by your standards, but I promise you I am capable.
You also do not indicate that you understand the difference between acts carried out by government and regulated persons such as doctors and individual, private acts. While government will rightly intervene if you are about to commit suicide in a public manner, goverment cannot prevent you if you are truly in private. Neither will you be charged with a crime. You will be presumed to be insane and incompetent.
If it is my suicide, I will not be charged with anything, because I am not so foolish as to 'attempt' suicide rather than 'acomplish' it.
Since the government is unable or unwilling to carry out the wishes of a loved one who is unable to die at their own hand, I will do what has to be done.
I doubt that incompetent is a correct description of my state of mind.
Insane depends on who is making the decision.
In the best of lights it might be called 'Texan' in the worst of lights 'sociopathic'.
At any rate it is the code my family has lived by for at least 300 years.
So9
The principle is that you have the right to refuse unwanted intervention or invasion of your body. That is why you may refuse a ventilator, or any other medical treatment, or even food and water.
You do not have the right to force another to do your will. And, being "inalienable," you do not have the right to deny or give away your right not to be killed.
However, the fact is that Terri did not write down her wish not to have food and water. Evidently, there were opposing stories about her wishes, the judge discounted her college friend's statements and her mother's recollection and believed the man who stood to gain from her death and his brother and his brother's wife. And then, in addition to ruling that low tech, use of the tube in place would stop, he ordered a medical intervention. Next, the judge ruled that no one could give nutrition and hydration by "natural means." These are not analogous to the refusal of a competent patient or following the express, expressed wishes of a formerly competent patient.
Relevent also is that the judge forbade nutrition and hydration by natural means.
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/abstract/313/7048/13
Free British Medical Journal article on misdiagnosis of PVS.
You don't think that forbidding all food and water, including by natural means was at all "polarizing"?
So, are you saying you want laws to prevent extending life on all of us because you want to die?
How very thoughtful and very selfish of you. If you want to die, you will find a way. Let the rest of us live our lives without the fear that the ghouls are hanging around figuring the best way to "off" us.
Not to mention that you are wanting laws that have the state/government committing murder on U.S. citizens and you are having man break one of the Ten Commandments.
You don't want much do you?
Is the right to kill so very important to you?
..".... when she(mother) died, she had no gums. They had been completely absorbed into her jaw...Her ears had been pulled into her skull as her body consumed itself in a desperate search for water and nutrition...her heart desperately tried to send blood to the vital organs and so all the blood was pulled away from the extremities...when she died she was black from her toes to her hips...she moaned with every breath even though she was on painkillers...when she died she didn't even look like my mother"...
How very sad and that woman will have that sight with her the rest of her days.
..Relevent also is that the judge forbade nutrition and hydration by natural means.
..
Which makes it murder. It would be murder if done anywhere else, it is murder if done by the state.
No, I think that transparently staged arrests for the sole purpose of getting the act on TV news is polarizing. It's polarizing because there's no intent to actually give Terri water; the sole intent is to get on television. If the purpose of those acts is to sway public opionion, the effect is exactly the opposite.
I know. I've posted about it many times. Just again a few hours ago.
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