Just had my teen watch this and I asked...Did you hear Terri laugh? the reply was "I'm not deaf".
A fate unclear, a legacy assured
By CHRIS TISCH
St. Petersburg Times
28-FEB-05
CLEARWATER, Fla. -- Fifteen years ago, the feeding tube that kept Nancy Cruzan alive was removed from her stomach.
Cruzan, who lay in a persistent vegetative state after suffering severe brain damage in an auto crash, died 12 days later. Her family was by her side while protesters and a crush of media waited outside the hospital.
The three-year court battle waged by Cruzan's family against the state of Missouri to remove her feeding tube established landmark law for people teetering at death's door, especially those unable to communicate their wishes. Partially because of Cruzan, those kinds of decisions are now usually left to family members.
To this day, Nancy Cruzan's is the only end-of-life case the U.S. Supreme Court has considered.
More than 1.5-million American families decide every year to withhold or withdraw medical treatment that could keep a loved one alive for days, months or years. While the Cruzan case helped establish a legal standard about end-of-life decisions, the case of Terri Schiavo has challenged that existing consensus.
The case has dragged on for seven years, more than twice the time it took to resolve the Cruzan case. It has featured intense political pressure, relentless media scrutiny, creative lawyering, religious fervor and a family torn over a wife and daughter's wishes.
For these reasons, experts say, it's likely the Schiavo case will be remembered in much the same way as those involving Cruzan and Karen Ann Quinlan, whose removal from a respirator in 1976 also is considered a landmark court decision.
"It certainly is an important case in that it has commanded an inordinate amount of attention," said Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. "They are fighting the consensus that has been entrenched for at least a decade."
Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer has ordered Schiavo's feeding tube to be removed March 18. Schiavo's tube has been taken out twice before, only to be reinserted by court order both times. If a court decides the tube should remain, modern end-of-life law could be turned on its head.
The most significant difference between the Cruzan and Schiavo cases are the women's families. The parents and siblings of Cruzan, who was not married, supported removing her feeding tube. Schiavo's family is split. Her husband wants the tube removed, while her parents and siblings want it to remain.
Cases of families at odds about end-of-life treatment are rare. When there is strife, it mostly hinges on family members struggling with an early prognosis that becomes more clear in a matter of days, said Steven Miles, a professor for the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota's department of medicine.
He said 80 percent of all family disputes over end-of-life decisions are resolved within three days. Except for rare cases, a judge doesn't get involved.
Over the past 30 years, Miles said, no more than 5,000 end-of-life cases have ended up in court. No more than 60 have gone on to an appeals court in that time. Cruzan's was the only one to go the United States Supreme Court.
If there is a dispute, one side usually relents, Caplan said.
In her hospital bed, Nancy Cruzan was unable to swallow, though her eyes were open and she could blink. She would sleep and moan or sigh.
Doctors told the Cruzans their daughter was in a persistent vegetative state. Brain scans showed her dead brain cells were being replaced by liquid. Doctors said she could live in that condition 30 years or more.
Four years later, the Cruzans decided the feeding tube should be removed, but had to fight the state to make it happen.
The first judge to hear the case sided with the Cruzans. But the Missouri attorney general appealed. The state Supreme Court reversed the ruling, 4-3, and said the state's duty to protect its citizens outweighed a person's right to refuse treatment.
The Cruzans took the case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices ruled 5-4 that the Cruzans did not have an automatic right to insist that hospital workers stop feeding Nancy. But the court also said the Cruzans could get the tube removed if they proved by "clear and convincing evidence" that she would want to die.
Though the ruling didn't allow the immediate removal of Nancy Cruzan's feeding tube, it affirmed that incapacitated people whose wishes are clearly known can have their treatment ended.
Prompted by the case's publicity, two of Nancy Cruzan's colleagues from a school for deaf and blind children said that in talking about disabled children, Cruzan had said she would not want to be kept alive by machines.
Armed with the new evidence and buoyed by the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Cruzans again asked a judge to order the tube removed, and he agreed. Cruzan's legacy was set.
Nancy's parents considered the decision a victory, even as they mourned her death. Right-to-life protesters called the Cruzans murderers. They stormed the hospital in an effort to reinsert the tube. Nineteen people were arrested.
Nancy Cruzan died of dehydration on Dec. 26, 1990.
The case took a terrible toll on the Cruzans. Six years later, Joe Cruzan hanged himself from his carport. Joyce Cruzan was diagnosed with cancer in 1998. She refused chemotherapy and died a few months later.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com.)
The problem with these videos is that they don't perform an actual test to see if the actions are voluntary.
In this video, if he stopped talking, it is as likely as not that she would keep making that noise. The fact that they don't demonstrate that transition tells me a lot. What you see is staged.
If they could show her doing something on command, stopping when told to, and then doing it on command again that would be impressive and I would be on the side to keep her alive. And probably so would the doctors and the courts.