On Terri Schiavo
As Harriet McBryde Johnson says, "The Terri Schiavo case is hard to write about, hard to think about." I've had an emotional deer-in-the-headlights response about it for quite some time now. Months. And while the legal options for saving Terri Schiavo from starvation may have been exhausted, I'll offer here some writings by others that provide the disability perspective so lacking in the mainstream debate.
Harriet McBryde Johnson on Slate, via Disability Law:
In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.
Steven Drake, research analyst for Not Dead Yet:
Given the current research regarding brain activity and misdiagnosis, it's a virtual certainty that countless people have been helpless to prevent their own deaths through starvation and dehydration. There's an analogy to DNA evidence and the death penalty. Here in Illinois, the staggering numbers of innocent and wrongly convicted people on Death Row resulted in a moratorium on the death penalty. Whether you agreed with the death penalty or not, everyone was forced to find ways to make sure no innocent person ended up on Death Row again. The same amount of concern should apply to medically induced deaths, in which the numbers far exceed the number of convicted people executed each year.More by Stephen Drake:
People on the right are killing us slowly with cuts to the budget and Medicaid while the people on the left kill us quickly and call it "compassion" -- either way we end up dead -- AND WE OBJECT.
Ragged Edge Editor Mary Johnson's outstanding comments at Common Dreams:
There isn't a single disability rights activist I've heard from who is happy that things ended up at such a sorry pass, and who isn't afraid that this will make liberals hate them even more than they now do. Yet it cannot help being noticed that it generally depends on whose ox is being gored as to what side of the states' rights debate one comes down on. We're all for federal laws when it comes to things like civil rights -- and gay marriage. We're not, though, when it comes to things we've labeled as "right to die" -- which we say are "privacy issues."
We might want to take another look at the cost of such privacy.
Further links to follow here.
4 comments:
This case is certainly tricky. the question is, to what extent was terri alive? her cerebral cortex was filled with fluid, and it depends on which doctor you listen to on whether she was concious or not. at the same time, twenty years agoo, doctors were saying similar things about us cp-ers.
The implications of the case go farther though, than Terri's sentience.
If someone cannot speak for themselves and wants to live, yet has the tube removed *with brain activity alertness etc.* This case can be used as precedent, if not legally, then in the minds of caregivers and legislators.
And on the other side: If someone cannot speak for themselves and wants to die, yet the tube remains inserted, yet again this case can sit in the back of someone's mind and influence them to do the opposite because of what they believed about Terri.
We're out of luck both ways.
I know this is an older issue (and an older blog), but it struck me anyway. One thing I can't understand is why no one brings up the real irony of the situation: Shiavo in a sense did this to herself. Because of a chemical imbalance prompted by an eating disorder, she had a stroke and was permanently brain damaged. It is only my assumption that someone so concerned with her appearance would not want to be left in the state that she was in. Or, was did she have the wherewithall to want either fate?
Dora, you're referring to reports of Terri Schiavo's bulimia. It is, as you say, an eating disorder. It isn't a diet or lifestyle choice, it is a serious psychological problem. In that sense, she didn't bring about (or choose) her stroke any more than anyone else brings about a sudden, unexpected medical emergency.
Part of my position on the Schiavo case is that people should be extremely wary of believing their own convictions about what conditions they would wish to die under when they have not yet tried living under those conditions. (Further, these convictions are suspect when our culture creates a hostile environment to wanting to live disabled.) Given that, a discussion of whether or not Schiavo's (alleged?) psychological illness created a kind of vanity against living disabled doesn't much interest me.
Post a Comment