Actually, this essay is filled with one misstatement after another. Her husband did not despair of her recovery. After he got the settlement money, he tried to kill her as rapidly as possible. The physicians who examined her were not qualified. They were both famous euthanasia advocates. She was not given careful examinations. Numerous neurologists have said that she needed to be examined over the course of a number of visits, and she never had an MRI because Michael Schiavo would not allow it.
There is no evidence that she was bulemic, but there are grounds for hypothesizing that he husband beat or strangled her the day she went into the hospital.
And so forth. This is a very careless summary of the case by a doctor who never examined the patient. After reading this analysis, I would not want anyone I cared for to be under his care.
Contemporary bioethics has become a natural ally of the culture of death, but the culture of death itself is a perennial human temptation; for onlookers in particular, it offers a reassuring answer (“this is how X would have wanted it”) to otherwise excruciating dilemmas, and it can be rationalized every which way till Sunday. In Terri Schiavo’s case, it is what won out over the hospice’s culture of life, overwhelming by legal means, and by the force of advanced social opinion, the moral and medical command to choose life, to comfort the afflicted, and to teach others how to do the same. The more this culture continues to influence our thinking, the deeper are likely to become the divisions within our society and within our families, the more hardened our hatreds, and the more manifold our fears. More of us will die prematurely; some of us will even be persuaded that we want to.
Excellent post, on the nose.
Thank you.
Best regards,
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