Terri Schiavo Dies
I know I have been quiet on the Terri Schiavo case as well as politically charged issues. But having read a lot of articles and now hearing that Terri Schiavo has died, I decided I ought to at least say something. This certainly is one of the few times I find myself on the same side of an issue as Jesse Jackson. If you happened to have read this article in Christianity Today (thanks to Brandon’s blog), you would know just how responsive some folks thought she was. I have read other articles that have attempted to tie people’s perception of Terri’s responsive to simple social interaction clues that we normally use… essentially saying that we make the puzzle fit because we are looking for pieces that work within our social interaction model. The article went on to compare interaction with Terri to interaction with a non-intelligent robot that was programmed to mimic human behavior. If you read that Christianity Today article, I think it goes beyond making the pieces fit. Terri’s interaction raised too many questions… at least too many to take the ultimate action by ending her life.
What we had at the core was a husband who says she told him that she would want to die given her situation. Obviously, there was no way she could have specified her feelings about her exact condition. But regardless, we had the husband’s word as the only basis for this. No written documents… no living wills… no voice recordings… just the husband saying that the feeding tube should be removed because “she said”. When you combine the countless testimony of folks who say that her husband was verbally and possibly physically abusive towards her while she was in her “vegetative state”, issues about life insurance and other conflicting items, it just doesn’t add up. I fail to believe that Michael Schiavo had her best interests at heart.
To think that a judge would go along with the idea that she should slowly be starved (and dehydrated) to death is absurd. There are a lot of judges and people that will have answer for their decisions or their inaction. It’s just absurd to think that our society can treat someone like Terri worse than a convicted murder.