Michael, RE: "What really upsets me is that she is being forced to die even while the courts are still deciding the matter. "
I had the same thought. You're right, serial killers are given an Appeal process with the Governor of their State. My Dad was on life support and he had only less than a 10% chance of living. My Dad was even in much better shape than Terri is. For starters, his brain wasn't liquid. They either didn't need to do a brain scan on my Dad because they knew his brain was alive or they did one and it was fine (I forgot which). Yet, his internist wanted to pull the plug. What many people don't realize is, behind the scenes a lot of life support systems are being pulled in cases that are significantly more debatable than Terri's.
Basically what is happening is our legal system is a decade behind the times. This case will hopefully iron out some laws for the future. What appears to be missing is a consistent, legal process on how to handle brain dead, vegetative patients that have been on life support for years (as well as non-brain dead patients.) Currently, the process is very random, doctor dependent, hospital dependent, insurance dependent, State dependent, etc. The process is random and there are significantly more valid patient cases that are being ignored, while Terri's more clear-cut case gets the media's attention. The legal system should be more robust than to allow such randomness.
RE: "I would be interested to see the reactions of liberals"
I'm a liberal.
My Mom is a Democrat and she's always made it clear she would never want to live on life support. 88% of the population would not want to remain alive if it meant life support.
My Dad is a Republican and he wanted to fight his illness, and he had (thankfully) provided reasonably clear directive (just before he went on life support) to remain alive on life support with the hope of getting off of it. And he eventually did get off of it and is alive today, albeit with problems.
In Terri's case, she has a liquid cerebral cortex (brain) which is why it appears the courts are consistently turning her parents down and siding with compassion to die. Having said that, the legal process needs to drastically improve and get caught up with the times because it's inappropriate to put her parents and Terri threw such a flip flop process. Additionally, I heard one judge decided to reject the case not on medical merits but on the merits of "this court has no jurisdication to make this decision." That's absolutely not a good reason to reject a case, I suspect the judge may have read the facts and been influenced to reject the case based upon the medical facts of the case. Fortunately, other judges have reviewed the medical aspects of the case. I agree it's disgusting how they let the person starve to death. As it stands right now, that is the only legal option in the USA for dieing adults. It's especially horrible how the courts keep changing their minds and equally horrible how the media is giving only this case attention (especially given her cerebral cortex is liquid) when there are other more noteworthy cases to discuss where the brain scans do indeed show a completely alive person.
Regards,
Amy J |
