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Mar. 21st, 2005 12:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
electriclandMust stop reading this stuff, but really: Irony -- ain't it grand?
Ms. Schiavo's mother, meanwhile, issued a national appeal for parents to call their Congressional representatives and pressure them to vote for the bill to prolong her daughter's life.
"There are some congressmen that are trying to stop this bill," Mrs. Schindler told reporters gathered outside her daughter's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla. "Please don't use my daughter's suffering for your own personal agenda."
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Date: 2005-03-21 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 06:08 pm (UTC)*cough*hypocrite*cough* How deluded or stupid could you be after fifteen years of seeing a daughter go through this? Using the cause of Terri's suffering so you can delay the inevitable sound of your delusions crashing down around you, when you finally have to realize that no amount of therapy will bring her back.
-caellum
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Date: 2005-03-21 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-21 06:20 pm (UTC)PK and I have discussed this kind of scenario a number of times over the years and we're both agreed that part of the busines of love is accepting that there comes a time when you have to let go. Terry Schiavo's parents sadly don't seem to understand this. To them their daughter seems to be like Snow White in her crystal coffin – only the prince is already there, trying to do his best, and they ... well, I'm sure they believe they're doing the right thing for the best of reasons but I don't believe they are.
In the UK we've had several court cases recently in which parents of small, very ill, terminally ill babies have been demanding that the doctors take extreme measures to resuscitate their children when they stop breathing, while the doctors have been arguing that there comes a time when the extremity of the measures the parents are asking them to take becomes more detrimental to the babies' well-being than letting them slip away peacefully. I understand that the parents are driven by desperate hope but I can see too that they're deluding themselves that reflex gripping and so forth shows signs of awareness that aren't there, and that this is, sadly, about them rather than about the sick child.
One is touched by George W. Bush's deep concern for the sanctity of life, a concern he seemed to show in far less measure when he was Governor of Texas and it was in his power to commute death sentences to life imprisonment, and he didn't.
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Date: 2005-03-22 03:16 pm (UTC)(Not to be confused with the Walk of Life, at least I don't think so.)
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Date: 2005-03-22 03:22 pm (UTC)In Prescription for Excellence, which is about fixing the Canadian health-care system, there's a rather telling vignette in which a 94-year-old (or so) woman is aggressively resuscitated after suffering cardiac arrest -- chest cracked, paddles directly on the heart, etc. -- and as the nurse who was interviewed said, "What on earth are we doing?" Why spend all this money and effort just to make someone's last few days or weeks of life hideous and painful?
I suppose it gets progressively harder the younger the patient is. I'm fortunate in that I've never had to make a decision like that (so far, anyway). But as you say -- at some point, loving someone means you have to let them go.
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Date: 2005-03-22 03:25 pm (UTC)Something I read yesterday made what I thought was an interesting point. I'm paraphrasing, but it was roughly this: If the cerebral cortex manages thought and feeling and consciousness and personality and everything that makes us us, that's getting very close to the traditional description of the soul. If the cerebral cortex is gone, is the soul gone too? Maybe the idea of a body without a soul is so repugnant to some people that they reject any evidence that it might be so.
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Date: 2005-03-22 03:26 pm (UTC)