Terri Schiavo
Mar. 22nd, 2005 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avramI’ve been meaning to write something about Terri Schiavo. I haven’t, largely because I find myself made very uncomfortable by too much about the whole affair. If I were king of the world, I’d have Terri put into her parents’ custody and encourage Michael to go through divorce proceedings. I’d also order Bush to publicly justify his signing the Texas Futile Care Law as Governor, and order that if anyone who voted to federalize this case ever uses “state’s rights” as a justification for anything ever again they’re to be bludgeoned to death with a metal-bound copy of The Federalist Papers.
Some of this discomfort comes from having watched a few of the videos up on the Terri’s Fight website. And some of the discomfort comes from knowing that those videos were cherry-picked out of four hours of footage that I’ll never see, and knowing the wonders that can be worked with that sort of cherry-picking.
Some comes from the very notion of the “persistent vegetative state”. Is anybody else squicked by that term? Isn’t it insulting to compare a human being to a vegetable? Is it too much to ask of our clinical, dispassionate medical terminology that it actually be clinical and dispassionate? And how often are these things misdiagnosed?
And then there’s the fact that the right wing has been complaining about “activist judges” for decades, and I’m worried that this could lead to some kind of wholesale assault on the judicial branch by the legislative and executive.
Other than that just go read what Jim Henley wrote, and know that I agree with about 90% of it.
Some of this discomfort comes from having watched a few of the videos up on the Terri’s Fight website. And some of the discomfort comes from knowing that those videos were cherry-picked out of four hours of footage that I’ll never see, and knowing the wonders that can be worked with that sort of cherry-picking.
Some comes from the very notion of the “persistent vegetative state”. Is anybody else squicked by that term? Isn’t it insulting to compare a human being to a vegetable? Is it too much to ask of our clinical, dispassionate medical terminology that it actually be clinical and dispassionate? And how often are these things misdiagnosed?
And then there’s the fact that the right wing has been complaining about “activist judges” for decades, and I’m worried that this could lead to some kind of wholesale assault on the judicial branch by the legislative and executive.
Other than that just go read what Jim Henley wrote, and know that I agree with about 90% of it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-03-23 04:33 pm (UTC)