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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (107638)	4/4/2005 2:47:58 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793917

What are the parameters for personal autonomy in right-to-die cases? I thought the question raised by the Terri Schiavo case was less ambitious -- it's well-established that patients can refuse medical care. Every state in the union allows Advanced Medical Directives wherein people can state, in advance, exactly what they do and do not want in the event that they are in a terminal condition. I thought the question was essentially as it was phrased by Zogby, more or less: in the absence of an express written directive on point, does "I don't want to live like that" and "just let me go" mean removing food and water when the patient is PVS? The definition Zogby used, "not on life support, not in a coma, not terminally ill" is a pretty good non-scientific paraphrase of what it means to be PVS. I was just reviewing the law in Virginia -- it appears that the General Assembly revised the law since the last time I checked, and PVS is now subsumed under "terminal condition," but I don't think that is what most of use mean by "terminally ill." PVS is a slippery concept. Arguably, it could be expanded to mean people who have become demented by Alzheimer's and senile dementia and strokes -- but are not at all comatose. The old law was mostly about DNRs at the point of death, when a person was experiencing cardiac arrest and respiratory arrest. So the concept of DNR when a person is at the end of life and experiencing cardiac arrest and respiratory arrest has sort of morphed into "pulling the plug" on a "vegetable" while I, at least, was not paying attention. I was thinking that I was just naive, but the Zogby poll indicates to me that a very large number of people haven't really thought long and hard about these issues.