Blog Jones

I am loath to post on this topic again; it doesn’t fit with the tone I like to keep on this blog. The story is too emotionally charged. And I hate to add anything to the “All Schiavo, All the Time” news climate we’re finding ourselves in. (If I were a politician, I’d pick now to push some really unpopular legislation, while no one’s looking.)

But, here I am anyways.

Once again, the courts have come down on “Michael’s side.” I use the scare quotes, because no one really wins on this one. According to one source, that makes 22 different judges that have come to the same conclusion, probably not counting the Supreme Court’s decision to not hear the case.

And I have to say that I’m proud of Jeb Bush. At least one politician knows the limits of his powers, unlike certain members of Congress. (I’m referring to their attempted abuse of their subpoena power, their interference with states’ rights, and their general political grandstanding, using Schiavo as a pawn to push their own political ends. For a particularly egregious example, read Ronald Brownstein’s column that begins “Does the ‘culture of life’ extend to the victims of gun violence?”)

Jeb, on the other hand, knows that he doesn’t have any legal standing to intervene. So, we have one or two politicians who won’t disregard their oaths to uphold the laws of the country.

As far as the accusations that we’re torturing Schiavo by starving her to death, it turns out that ceasing food and fluid can be painless, according to the L.A. Times quoting doctors Robert Sullivan, Perry G. Fine, and Ira Byock, as well as a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In fact, the Times story states (my emphasis):

After suffering through cancer, the middle-aged woman decided her illness was too much to bear. Everything she ate, she painfully vomited back up. The prospect of surgery and a colostomy bag held no appeal.

And so, against the advice of her doctors, the patient decided to stop eating and drinking.

Over the next 40 days in 1993, Dr. Robert Sullivan of Duke University Medical Center observed the woman’s gradual decline, providing one of the most detailed clinical accounts of starvation and dehydration.

Instead of feeling pain, the patient experienced the sense of euphoria that accompanies a complete lack of food and water. She was cogent for weeks, chatting with her caregivers in the nursing home and writing letters to family and friends. As her organs failed, she slipped painlessly into a coma and died.

(I found the above story via Instapundit who found it by way of Daily Pundit.)

So, it turns out that death by a complete lack of food is actually a fairly peaceful way to go. (The story does say that eating a little food or water will cause hunger pangs and other unpleasantness, but having absolutely nothing causes the euphoria.)

So you can’t use that argument anymore: She is not being tortured to death.

Next, some argue that because her eyes move, she’s not in a persistent vegetative state. Dr. Elizabeth M. Whelan, of the American Council on Science and Health, writes the following, which I also found via Instapundit, my emphasis again:

While we at American Council on Science and Health have been determined to remain on the sidelines of the raging national debate about the fate of Terri Schiavo (this is largely a legal and ethical issue, not a scientific one), we cannot remain silent about the outrageous misrepresentation of scientific facts about this case that has been occurring in the past ten days.

The medical reality of Ms. Schiavo’s case is this: She has been in what is medically referred to as a “permanent vegetative state” for the past 15 years, ever since her heart temporarily stopped (probably due to the severe effects of an eating disorder), depriving her brain of oxygen. Brain scans indicate that her cerebral cortex ceased functioning — probably just after she experienced cardiac arrest in 1990. Ms. Schiavo’s CAT scan shows massive shrinking of the brain, and her EEG is flat. Physicians confirm that there is no electrical activity coming from her brain. While the family video repeatedly shown on television suggests otherwise, her non-functioning cortex precludes cognition, including any ability to interact or communicate with people or show any signs of awareness. Dozens of experts over the years who have examined Ms. Schiavo agree that there is no hope of her recovering — even though her body, face and eyes (if she is given food and hydration) might continue to move for decades to come.

Those are the harsh facts.

Ah, you say, but what about the doctors who said that she was misdiagnosed? Dr. Whelan continues:

Thus it was shocking that Sen. Bill Frist — a heart surgeon before becoming Senate majority leader — went to the Senate floor twice last week to argue that Florida doctors had erred in saying that Terri is in a “persistent vegetative state.” How did Frist arrive at this diagnosis? From watching the family videotapes.
…
Yesterday, there was another public challenge to Ms. Schiavo’s well-established diagnosis: Florida governor Jeb Bush announced that a “very renowned neurologist,” Dr. William Cheshire, had concluded that Terri had been misdiagnosed and that she was really only in a state of “minimal consciousness” rather than a persistent vegetative state. He used this “new diagnosis” to argue that “this new information raises serious concerns and warrants immediate action.”

As it turns out, Dr. Cheshire is not “renowned” as a neurologist — his limited publications focus on areas including headache pain and his opposition to stem cell research. Dr. Cheshire never conducted a physical examination of Ms. Schiavo, nor did he do neurological tests. Dr. Cheshire is director of biotech ethics at the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity, a nonprofit group founded by “more than a dozen leading Christian bioethicists.” Everyone is free to be guided by a personal agenda — and it is clear that Dr. Cheshire has his.

This, combined with the fact that the court-appointed doctors, who are the only ones whose opinions mattered, agreed that Schiavo is in a PVS, invalidates the argument that she’s not in a PVS.

Next argument: Folks, life support is life support. Whether it’s pumping air in someone who can’t get air into themselves (via respirator) or it’s pumping food into someone who can’t feed themselves (via feeding tube), it’s still artificial life support. The only difference is that you can live a few days without food and water, while you can’t live without air for more than about twelve minutes, and that only if you’re a trained diver. Come on now, this argument was pretty weak to begin with.

Is it murder to withdraw artificial life support from Mrs. Schiavo? I don’t think so, and 22 judges who were closer to this case than any of us are have come to that same conclusion. If it was murder to withdraw such life support, we’d have hospital after hospital full of dead people being artificially kept alive.

So, when do we pull the plug? Again, the question has to be “Who decides?” And again, because Terri left no living will, and because Michael is her closest relative, and because the courts have not found him guilty–nor has he even been charged with–any crime against his wife (the slander of Terri’s parents notwithstanding), you have to come to the conclusion that Michael Schiavo is the one who is given the burden of choice here.

That’s the way I see it.