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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zonder who wrote (16070)	3/22/2005 12:40:57 PM
From: Suma	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

Usually I respect your opinions with zeal but in this instance I do not grasp ( and it may be just me) that you would feel as though this woman was alive. She is breathing and her heart is beating. If she had not been resuscitated she would have died a natural death. Instead there was an intervention...She is not alive in my thinking other than the heart beating and her breathing.. She is brain dead. This does not put her in a class with Christopher Reed who had all of his faculties... This woman cannot communicate. Her eyes do not follow any movement. As someone on the radio talk show last night said, she is like a plant in the room. That is as far as she has cognizance. This state has been going on since 1990. In 1996 Michael gave up on her. I do not blame him. I am of the opinion that by this time he had a right to a life too. What does it benefit anyone to remain in a vegetative state. In a nursing home I was in a room where man had been in a coma for 20 years. He lay in a bed incontinent. He had to have his nails clipped, his beard shaved and be fed. His family wanted to keep him alive and had enough money to pay. I thought at the time it was a travesty. He did not acknowledge anything going on around him. He had been a Dr. and brilliant but now he was in a vegetative state. They were hoping that he would regain consciousness. The nurses all said that all the Dr.'s who had examined him had said he was brain dead. This is what TS is, It was about that time along with the cognizance of what was happening to my own parents... dad being fed through a tube in his stomach, mother incontinent,deaf,bed ridden and both asking to die that I not only saw the need for Living Wills but the uselessness of keeping someone in a state of unconsciousness. I investigated the Hemlock Society at the time and thought that the governing ones death had implications for maintaining our human dignity. It is a shame that we are so afraid of death in this Country that we do not acknowledge that it is part of life's process. There is a time to be born and a time to die. When one is unable to govern ones own life for me it is time. I would never want to be dependent on anyone else nor ruin the life of another to have to be a care giver forever. This is why I cannot condemn Michael. I see letting TS go as an act of mercy. Isn't it strange how we all view things differently. That's what makes the world go round.