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(note that i haven't read any of the responses on this thread before writing this).
i just don't understand why this seems to be such a partisan issue. im normally pretty liberal about things but am at a complete loss here. on one hand you have the media throwing teri's vegetated-looking face all over cable tv(im sure she would have loved that), which makes me sort of blame them for most of the enormous attention this whole thing is getting. i mean, to my understanding, they do this sort of thing in texas all the time (which also baffles me, since bush seems to be all for giving teri back her feeding tube). you don't see these homeless men who can't pay for medical care all over the news, so why now?
all this aside, the only thing we really have to go by that teri would have wanted to die is her husband's word, and even if he is telling the truth about that it is only in regard to some passing comment she made while watching some television show, and neither of them obviously took it seriously enough to put it into writing. and why now, after fifteen years of this, did he suddenly come out with this information that could have put teri out of her misery early on?
so the doctors say her entire frontal cortex has turned to mush from disuse. according to them, this is the center of consiousness, and with it gone it would simply be impossible for her to feel anything. but really, how does anyone know that for absolute certain? apparently her brainstem is still alive, which is responsible for mere reflex action, heartbeat, breathing, waking cycles, etc. but i never knew the brainstem could make a person sit up and move their eyes around and everything she appears to be doing. but, hell, im not a neurologist, so i'm not going to ignorantly pursue this any further. but even if i were a neurologist, would i be so bold as to state with absolute certainty that she can feel no pain? absolutely not. all a neurologist has to go by on this are little markings on a brainscan showing certain parts of the brain that are in use when certain things are being done, like thinking, breathing, being wakefu, etc. but even at that how can you be positive? the brainstem is what is responsible for a person's pulling back of the hand when it touches something hot, so it obviously registers some sort of pain, but again i'm not a neurologist. i guess what i'm trying to get at is that nobody is completely, absolutely sure about any of these metaphysical questions such as the nature of "consciousness," etc, so to quote the staunch conservatives, why not err on the side of life? you take the two possibilities, (a. teri cannot feel anything and therefore it would not make one bit of difference to her whether she lives or dies, or b. teri has some form of consiousness down there somewhere, and letting her starve to death is not only murder, but blatant torture). so with possibility a., letting her live is essentially the same (except for time, energy and money, all of which teri's parents would gladly be willing to provide if her husband would just turn it over to them, divorce teri, and move on with his life) as letting her die. with possibility b., letting her live, even in her vegetative, hypothetically catatonic state, would probably be better than starving her to death. this is just my opinion. if a person is unable to say one way or the other what they want, i say we should err on the side of life (at least over starvation. if there were some other option, such as a dose of heavy morphine, essentially proactively euthanizing her, i may have to rethink this a little). anyway, this whole case just illustrates how little we know about the human brain and life and consciousness and all that philosophical mumbojumbo, and how much we still have to learn.
"You are reading this."
[ Edited by Windupnostril at
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