A married woman gets involved in a car wreck. She’s taken to the hospital, unconscious and brain-injured. The doctors need to perform surgery to remove excessive liquid in her brain, but her husband claims that her wife is a Christian Scientist who will not accept surgery. He claims that prayer will heal his wife.
The doctors maintain that unless they drain her brain and install a temporary drain tube on her head, she will die due to the continuous fluid buildup inside her skull.
Her parents assert she talked to them on the phone a few days before the accident, and the parents say that she told them that surgery was not against her evolving understanding of Christian Science. The parents want surgery performed immediately to relieve the pressure inside her skull and save her life.
Should Jeb stop the painful death of this woman due to the fluid buildup inside her skull? Should Jeb allow the husband to speak as her guardian?
First off, unless this happens within the next 15 days, the point will be moot with regard to the current law.
If Jeb had the authority to intervene, I would expect him to defer to the courts unless he had extremely strong reason to believe that they were in error. In Terri's case, evidence exists of numerous conflicts of interest which Greer refused to acknowledged; Greer's refusal to acknowledge such conflicts of interest suggests he likely has some of his own.
Basically, I would interpret Jeb's power in this case as being a civil-law equivalent to the pardon power. Just as criminal-law cases are too important to be left entirely in the hands of a single trial-court judge, so too should be certain life-and-death civil law cases.
YES!
Should Jeb allow the husband to speak as her guardian?
NO! In any instance where preserving life is concerned the choice should always be LIFE.
I'm not Catholic and I don't agree with Catholic beliefs on some points, but I believe Catholic doctrine is exactly right on the issue of the sanctity of human life. IMHO the most admirable virtue of Pope John Paul has been his unwavering support for life and his denunciation of the Satanic cult of death which has come to permeate modern western society.
I'm afraid if that good man in his present physical state was under the jurisdiction of Judge Greer and his fellow black-robed ghouls he would be in dire peril of being starved to death.