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Highball - You want Facts, you want an adult conversation - call the doctors below. And don't let your emotions get in the way of calling them.

Two doctors blast NYT after its anti-Jeb editorial re Terri S.
The NYT - Letters to the Editor ^ | June 21, 2005 | Dr. Carl d'Angeio and Dr. Michael Egnor

Excerpted from today's NYT Letters to the Editor section:

Jeb Bush's Move in the Schiavo Case (6 Letters)

To the Editor:

Re your June 18 editorial about the Schiavo case:

We did not need an autopsy to know that Terri Schiavo had hopeless brain damage, or to know that many of her body's systems were normal.

Her family loved what was left of her and asked only to be permitted to care for her at their own expense.

My question is, Who or what was better served by her passive execution by water deprivation rather than by the first alternative?

Carl d'Angio, M.D.
Mount Vernon, N.Y., June 18, 2005

To the Editor:

Terri Schiavo's autopsy report claimed that she was probably blind. Supporters of the decision to starve her to death have hailed this finding as bolstering their argument that withdrawal of her feeding tube was ethical.

Their reasoning is hard to follow.

If Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, blindness is a meaningless diagnosis. Only sentient people can see, and only sentient people can be blind. And if she were blind, then she was sentient, and the diagnosis of persistent vegetative state was a genuinely fatal mistake.

The lapses in logic aside, it's chilling to assert that it's more ethical to starve a handicapped person if that person is blind. This is what passes for ethics among advocates for euthanasia.

Michael Egnor, M.D.
Stony Brook, N.Y., June 18, 2005

The writer is vice chairman of the department of neurological surgery, SUNY, Stony Brook

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...