And the removal of Ms. Schiavo's feeding tube has been pushed to the 18th.

[conuly]

Here.

Before people start debating this, let's get the following out of the way:
She doesn't use a ventilator.
She's not "hooked up to a machine" to live.
She isn't on life support, at least not as it's been defined to me.
She uses a feeding tube to eat. Removing this would cause her to starve to death/dehydrate.
Her parents say that she's minimally aware.
Her husband disagrees, and says that she didn't want to live like this.
He is living with another woman.
AFAIK, nothing from the insurance went to cover therapy for her.
It is argued that this therapy could've improved her condition.


Now you can go duke it out in my journal.

Comments

[maladaptive.livejournal.com]

You know where I stand on this. I find it abhorrent that so many people supported his decision to starve her to death. Even if she didn't want to have therapy or anything, I'm sure she wouldn't want to die a lingering death.

[jet87.livejournal.com]

I honestly don't know whats worse: how her "husband" is sleeping with another woman (if he's living with her, you can be pretty sure of that), or that the ads in the article are all about dating women in Florida.

[wakasplat.livejournal.com]

What can I say that I haven't already said? Disgusting, terrifying, awful. :-( (My latest (friendslocked) post is in part about the attitudes that perpetuate this, although didn't mention this in particular.)

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

I'm with maladaptive -- I find it horrifying that anybody would find it acceptable to kill somebody based on a disability, particularly by these means.

Most of my viewpoint is either firsthand or from knowing those in her postiion (or similar). A lot of people with my birth anomalies rely on a g-tube for feeding, and I have the same appliance installed for evacuating. I've been unable to talk in the cognitive and mechanical senses, stuck in bed, unable to move or use most of my body at various points... Through all of it, the times I wanted to die was when it was crushingly obvious people detested what I was or when I was in unbearable pain, never because of the physical issues themselves.

I wish we could get a "jury of peers" for disabled people, so WE could be the ones making policy on whether or how we get to live or die... Ths kind of case (Schiavo, medical marijuana, accommodation rights, etc.) always feels to me like a jury of rich white sorority girls in 1940 deciding what punishment to assign to a poor black guy for looking at them wrong.

[wakasplat.livejournal.com]

I wish we could get a "jury of peers" for disabled people, so WE could be the ones making policy on whether or how we get to live or die... Ths kind of case (Schiavo, medical marijuana, accommodation rights, etc.) always feels to me like a jury of rich white sorority girls in 1940 deciding what punishment to assign to a poor black guy for looking at them wrong.

Only knowing how such things work, it'd be something like a jury of Christopher Reeve, Elizabeth Bouvia, etc. :-/ (That's what happens when disabled people get appointed to a lot of state agency positions, they find tokens who are either acquiescent or have a lot of internalized ableism.)

And yeah, part of my fear is fear that it could happen to me or others I know in the wrong situation. I know people who right now could no more prove they were aware than she can.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

If he wants no part of her, he should divorce her.

Just put her behind him. Let her be her parent's responsbility.

And let her live. If there is question if one should live or die, always err on the side of living, I think. No one lives forever, but you are dear forever.

[conuly]

But then he couldn't get married in the church. And he couldn't inherit. That settlement wasn't enormous, but it was pretty significant.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

He could get an annulment, I bet. I would imagine that this would be grounds for it, what I know of the annulment process (if he is Catholic).

And hey, if he wants to wait around for the inheritence, then he has to deal with just living with his girlfriend. That's all. (If he is named in a will or on a policy, would divorcing void it? I know I actually changed names on my policies when I got divorced.)

[conuly]

Except the money in the policy isn't supposed to go to him or to his legal bills. It was supposed to go for therapy and treatment for her. I'm fairly certain that her parents would contest any attempts to take her money if she just died on her own.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Oh, I thought you meant a life insurance policy.

[jet87.livejournal.com]

I agree that if he doesn't want to deal with her, he should divorce her. However, getting the divorce when your spouse is (for lack of better word at the moment) disabled it could be harder than usual.

I've always believed in letting her live, and I'm not about to change sides.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

My (step) mother in law is actually a professional witness/consultant for court cases, insurance companies, individuals and their families. She actually has mentioned something about family members who see the disabled person or the injured person as some sort of ATM machine. There are times where she has to set up things to make sure the money goes to schools, therapists, any home construction for accessability, and so on. I'd imagine it's not an easy job, between the side that wants you to cut corners, and the side that wants everything and then some. (Like someone who wanted to relocate to some tropical island -- great for mom, but for her child, in need of a life of therapy and special schooling, not so hot. But hey, who cares when you live in such a paradise, right? Yeesh.)

[jet87.livejournal.com]

If he's living with another woman, it seems he wouldn't care too much about an annulment.

[ex-chaos-by-699.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with Christopher Reeve?

I'm just curious. I know very little about disability activism.

[conuly]

He made a big deal about curing his paralysis - stem cell research and all that. This is a good thing, to be sure, but he also made specific comments about how he "wasn't really interested in lower curb cuts" and so on.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

It actually might be easier, as cold hearted as it sounds. In a lot of places not having intercourse for a year is enough reason for divorce (and the technical reason I got divorced since NYS doesnt have much in the way of grounds for divorce).

And as far as annulment goes, it was suggested by a priest that my husband annull our marriage (not knowing that we had a civil ceremony) because at the time it looked like I was sterile. I was a waste of perfectly good sperm, I guess. A similar ruling could take place. Hell, money can get almost anyone annulled.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

There is going to be a lot of push for accessability in the coming years as the baby boomers have harder times getting around. They're gonna be sorry they didn't speak out when they were out jogging and taking step classes and all that.

(I, for one, appreciate ramps, curb cuts, and the like. Not for the time I spent in a wheelchair, but for my day to day life as a mother who has to use a stroller. Access is a good thing, and benefits more than people realize.)

[azarias.livejournal.com]

I find it absolutely disgusting that we're so afraid of death that the most humane option allowed is to force her body to starve to death. There are a great many cleaner, quicker ways that don't carry even the potential of pain (not that there really seems to be anyone home to feel pain, understandable wishful thinking of her parents aside, but there's a principle there). Someone who has no frontal lobe function -- who has, for that matter, a severely atrophied brain -- who is bedbound, who is operating only on the lowest lizard levels of life is not a person anymore; that's desecration of a corpse. Let the poor woman go.

[azarias.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I'm a hardliner about this, and it has nothing to do with begrudging disabled people their rights. It has everything to do with where I draw the line on what constitutes a person, and the absolute horror I feel that I could be in her position some day, where I'm kept alive half because people I care about would think that I wanted to be that way and half because other people are trying to make a point.

[conuly]

Her family maintains that she reacts to them, they have videos of this. As for bed-bound, careful, you've described a significant portion of the people replying to this entry

[conuly]

Have you written your wishes down? As near as I can, she hadn't. The only word we have about her wishes are from her husband - and, let's face it, he's got ulterior motives coming out his ass.

[wakasplat.livejournal.com]

I'm not afraid of death. I'm afraid of murder and of desecrating certain forms of life just because some people can't imagine personhood or are afraid of contemplating personhood without a certain amount of brain function.

[wakasplat.livejournal.com]

Where you draw the line on what constitutes a person has everything to do with begrudging disabled people our rights. Disabled doesn't exclude profoundly disabled, you know. You can't just draw a neat little line down disabled people's lives and say "On this side you're alive and on that side you're not." That's by definition begrudging a certain category of disabled people their rights.

You say below that we're afraid of death. It seems you're afraid of certain kinds of life (at least "horror" that you could be alive in that kind of state seems to sum that up). Maybe we're not afraid of death, but rather being killed because someone who has never lived in that state thinks they can decide that we should die if we enter that state. Being alive is inevitably reversible. Death is not. And I'm tired of the fear of you and other people of being alive in certain states being weighed in the same balance as people's lives. Your emotional state versus people's lives. I think I'd prefer you stayed afraid and she and some people I know who can no more "prove" their awareness than she can stay alive.

And if you're so terrified of living like that, there are already provisions you can use. On the other hand, you may find that you wake up one day severely brain damaged, state in some form that you want to live, and other people overrule this on the basis that you're considered incompetent, vegetative, or having seizures. This has happened to people.

[wakasplat.livejournal.com]

Remembering history:

Martin Luther
The Story of a Changeling at Dessau
Eight years ago [in the year 1532] at Dessau, I, Dr. Martin Luther, saw and touched a changeling. It was twelve years old, and from its eyes and the fact that it had all of its senses, one could have thought that it was a real child. It did nothing but eat; in fact, it ate enough for any four peasants or threshers. It ate, shit, and pissed, and whenever someone touched it, it cried. When bad things happened in the house, it laughed and was happy; but when things went well, it cried. It had these two virtues. I said to the Princes of Anhalt: "If I were the prince or the ruler here, I would throw this child into the water--into the Molda that flows by Dessau. I would dare commit homicidium on him!" But the Elector of Saxony, who was with me at Dessau, and the Princes of Anhalt did not want to follow my advice. Therefore, I said: "Then you should have all Christians repeat the Lord's Prayer in church that God may exorcise the devil." They did this daily at Dessau, and the changeling child died in the following year.... Such a changeling child is only a piece of flesh, a massa carnis, because it has no soul.

It seems some people are willing to say the same today. I find it just as horrible that people say this like this about Terri Schiavo as that long ago this boy was considered soulless. This is what happens when you draw lines like this.

[moggymania.livejournal.com]

"It has everything to do with where I draw the line on what constitutes a person"

I tend to feel that it's not up to others to decide whether a human being is a 'person' or not, especially based on a lack of experience. Doubly so considering that a lot of the time, there's just no way to know what the outcome will be, so assuming 'this can't be a person' makes no sense considering it's not necessarily a static state. (I know at least three people that suffered severe brain injuries and were at the same point Schiavo was, yet with rehab were able to absolutely qualify as what you would call a 'person' -- one became an internationally-respected professor of disability studies.)

"and the absolute horror I feel that I could be in her position some day"

The question is, though, what is horrifying about it? All of the major detractors I'm aware of in that position are socially-engineered rather than inherent, and could thus be altered to *not* be worthy of horror.

"where I'm kept alive half because people I care about would think that I wanted to be that way"

There's an old phrase that fits here really well: you don't know until you've been there. You think right now that you would rather be dead than be in her position, and you *might* be right, but you could also be wrong. Evidence from those that have actually been there shows that once they're in that position, most of the time they *don't* want to die.

"and half because other people are trying to make a point"

Though that's also what you're trying to do -- you evidently would rather she be killed in order to make *your* point.