Saving Terri
Update: My Wife, a physician to be, takes issue with my defense of Terri. We spent about 45 peak minutes discussing this, but my position remains firm. It boils down to this:
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.
While there may be a range of autonomic responses that don’t involve the higher cognitive processes, these responses constitute life and should be treated as such. Just because Terri can’t voice her own opinions, or communicate as she once did does not mean that she should be executed. After all, there are people alive today who exhibit few higher cognitive functions, yet we don’t kill them.
As for her quality of life, who are we to judge? If she is as brain dead as the pro-execution side would have you believe, where’s the harm in letting her body remain alive? She’s not locked in - buried alive in her own body as many people wrongly assume when the imagine themselves in her position.
Yes my position places me on the opposite side of the courts; perhaps it also puts me in conflict with medical authorities - but you know what? I’ll survive it. I’ve always danced to my own drummer. I may live in my own world but it’s okay, they know me here.
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Sometimes I don’t go looking for an fight, but one manages to find me somehow. The story of Terri Schindler-Schiavo is a long and complex one. It is also a private one that complete strangers should not be involved in, and I include myself in that group. Yet this story has escalated into a brawl of sorts between those who want to execute her and those who want the life or death decision to remain out of Man’s (and the State’s) hands.
I wrote about Terri here a year and a half ago. Dean has an article here and here that I have commented in.
My position is this:
If we were considering the fate of a prisoner, there would not be enough evidence to condemn him to death. In the case of Terri, there is more than a “reasonable doubt” that she is alive and prefers to stay that way. I want Terri to be given the same rights that a condemned killer receives from our judicial system.
