First, I'm not trying to pick a fight here -- I'm trying to understand your position.
For the sake of discussion, I'll grant you that the diagnosis of PVS is correct. I'll grant that this was thoroughly litigated. I'll grant that there is a huge amount of emotionalism and irrelevant nonsense being tossed around by some who agree with me.
Granting the above, my question is this: Is it right (not just legal, but right) to kill someone soley because they have been diagnosed with PVS? If the answer is yes, then how do we know how to draw the line at PVS, and not, say, at Downs syndrome, severe autists, or other severly disabled people?
Seriously, this is not a flame, or bait; I really just don't understand, and very much want to.
Seriously, if we don't like the way things are done currently, then work the system and get the legislation changed.
And if you want to be kept alive indefinitely regardless of the prognosis or your cognitive abilities, don't ever sign a living will and make sure that your family knows you don't mind being hooked up to a machine for a long time because maybe there's a new cure around the corner. And maybe there is.
On the floor of the House Sunday night Congressmen and at least one doctor said this is done thousands of times a day in America. I had thought hundreds. And they were referring to the fact that people are taken off life support equipment and feeding tubes. And most of that is without benefit of Living Wills and based on a doctor's recommendation and the family's consent.
"my question is this: Is it right (not just legal, but right) to kill someone soley because they have been diagnosed with PVS?"
See? That's the problem. everyone misses that that is absolutely not what is happening.
Here - from my profile page:
First, simply understand that, under Florida law, as approved by the US Supreme Court in Cruzan, (in which they gave states the right to determine what level of evidence was necessary to determine a patient's wishes) the deciding issue is whether or not there is clear and convincing evidence that Terri would or wouldn't want to be maintained on a feeding tube. It is not about determining her quality of life. It is simply a matter of a patient's ability to refuse treatment, whether by oral or written statements made while they were lucid.
As stated in 2001, by the Florida 2nd District Court of appeals in their support of the foundation ruling (linked to below, they found that there was clear and convincing evidence that she wouldn't want the tube to remain.
They also noted that Michael did not make the decision - he asked the court to listen to both sides and for the court to take his role in this matter of her tube. He did not have to do that. He could have forced he parents to challenge his legal decision from a less powerful position.
http://abstractappeal.com/schiavo/trialctorder02-00.pdf
Greer's decision that there was clear and convincing evidence she would not want the tube.
Then, read the second district's very informative affirmation of his ruling:
http://abstractappeal.com/schiavo/2dcaorder01-01.txt
Description of the testimony at the 2000 trial to determine Terri's wishes.
http://www.sptimes.com/2003/11/08/Tampabay/Schiavo_s_wishes_reca.shtml
If you study those, it should really help clear up what this is all about.
It's also about the right of my wife to make that decision in the event I am unable to.
There are several cases where I would prefer death to forced feeding...And for 15 years?...I'd come back and haunt her if she allowed that.
Is it right?
Should death by omission be considered murder?
It is a complex ethical question.
If it can be considered so then how many crimes of this nature are committed by society every day. Think Sudan. Or any other place where death starvation, and injustice prevail because we do nothing...sometimes for the most practical reasons.
But at the level of the family this should be a private matter for if we are not responsible as murderers for the death by omission of the many how can we claim a moral high ground to stand on the claim of one?
I am a long time fan of William F. Buckley.
This is what he wrote about this case. I concur with him.
March 23, 2005, 11:18 a.m. The Great Quandary Enough. What was good was that the resources of the entire nation, so it seemed, could be aroused with only the end in mind of sparing — more accurately, prolonging — a single life. It was left only to mobilize the Seventh Fleet to level a thousand guns on the doctors engaged in removing the tubes from Terri Schiavo. Not since 6-year old Elian Gonzalez was ordered by the courts to return to Cuba, there to submit to a lifetime of servitude under Fidel Castro Inc., had there been such a mobilization of public sentiment.
What broke the back of the Free Elian movement was a social convention: deferral to the wishes of the father. He wanted Elian home, and traveled to Florida to pick him up after an eristic judicial storm — which ended with the simple daybreak that the future of a child is to be decided by his parents.
In the case of Terri Schiavo, orderly thought would have led us to believe that her treatment was the next of kin's to decide. But human concern for Mrs. Schiavo interposed qualifiers: The husband had attached himself to another woman, by whom another family had begun. This suggested a diluted moral, though not legal, authority of the husband. Then the father and the mother of the stricken girl argued to keep her alive — to keep her pulse beating. Terri is not, repeat not, brain dead, though she is unable to communicate. Meanwhile the courts of Florida were guided, or seemed to be, by precedents which treated as relevant only the absence of a living will by Mrs. Schiavo, and the legal recognition of her husband as head of the family. The two considerations estopped any movement by the courts to assume authority, as though she belonged to them.
Those many who pleaded to continue the patient's life emphasized the theoretical possibility of a cure, or a rehabilitation of sorts. On this point her parents argued most tenaciously. They released, over the weekend, tapes made of their afflicted daughter, which could be interpreted as showing Terri to be responding to stimuli of various kinds.
But the world was looking at a woman whose immobilizing heart attack happened fifteen years ago. An anonymous doctor declared flatly that she had a flat EEG — electroencephalogram, the brain wave test.
But the political impulse was heartening, even if the hopes voiced were falsetto science. What caused the political commotion was the sense that we were presiding over an execution. Terri Schiavo remained "alive," until we stopped feeding her. Then she began a fall through a trapdoor descending toward death. She was being committed to a death of an agonizing kind, surely? One that began with the removal of the tubes, and would continue until starvation and dehydration brought on the end of the heartbeat.
Some years ago, in a forum on euthanasia, my guest was the Reverend Robert L. Barry, who had studied the subject extensively. Father Barry argued that the deprivation of food and water brings on physical pain whatever else the human condition.
Was the court system in Florida, then, acquiescing in death by pain for Mrs. Schiavo? A doctor consulted by one television analyst brushed aside the question, in language not readily transcribed by a layman. He seemed to be saying that Mrs. Schiavo would not suffer pain as the term is commonly understood.
But that question was not directly accosted by the judge, who said only that Terri's rights had not been abrogated. It was unseemly for critics to compare her end with that of victims of the Nazi regime. There was never a more industrious inquiry, than in the Schiavo case, into the matter of rights formal and inchoate. It is simply wrong, whatever is felt about the eventual abandonment of her by her husband, to use the killing language. She was kept alive for fifteen years, underwent a hundred medical ministrations, all of them in service of an abstraction, which was that she wanted to stay alive. There are laws against force-feeding, and no one will know whether, if she had had the means to convey her will in the matter, she too would have said, Enough.
* * *
In previous posts, Peach has indicated that she does not think there is any slippery slope here. Personally, I am very afraid for the severely disabled, because once a line has been drawn, it's a trivial matter to move it to put a few more people on the other side of it. Each time, it becomes easier to rationalize away the worth of these lives, until finally, no one even bothers with rationalization any more.