The Rude Pundit tells it like it is

I warn you, the following is extraordinarily rude. Perhaps so rude as to be unsafe for work, despite being devoid of incriminating graphics, sound, or conspicuous profanity. It simply says what needs saying, and what needs saying isn't pretty.

The Rude Pundit on Terry Schiavo.

For the record, I don't endorse active euthanasia for Terry Schiavo because there is no indication that she wanted or would have wanted it for herself. However, the courts have found that she wouldn't have wanted to be kept alive by artificial nutrition and hydration. Therefore these intrusive measures should cease. Nobody has a right to force a tube into this non-consenting woman's body, regardless of how happy it makes them feel or what real or imagined inadequacies it helps them assuage. Sorry, no special dispensations for parental units.

Comments

[Mark]

She doesn't need to die, she's already dead. I've never quite understood why either side gets worked up about this. There's no 'there' there.

Should we allow the body to die? Yea, but really only to save on medical bills. If her parents want to keep the body ticking, who really cares? She's dead already.

I just don't get it.

[thehim]

Rude Pundit doesn't have comments so I'll say it here...

The desperation of the right is partially from the recognition that this situation also illustrates the utter insanity of the notions that they pull out to support trying to ban abortion. All forms of life are not equal human lives in a realistic sense. Anti-choice folks are nervous about what this means, and they should be.

[Jape]

Johnny Cash would not approve of this pro-death revelling.

[tristram]

Is Terry's smile the same sort of smile I see on the faces of those who say "Smile, God loves you (unless you're an evolutionist)"?

[JR]

"the nerve-reflex smile"
Rude Pundit is now an expert in the physiology of brain injury, I see.

"narcissistic parents who have pathetically deluded themselves"
Or perhaps loving parents who mistakenly but understandably have no faith in the white-coated authority figures of professional medicine.

"we believe suffering is a gift from God"
But the point is that Schiavo doesn't feel anything, not even suffering- well, why let logical consistency interfere with a good rant?

"Terry Schiavo was a vain woman"
Oh, lovely. Her mental illness was a moral failing- she deserved what's happened to her.

"pulling up her gown and raping her"
Now there's a laugh line - let's all thank the RP for giving us an image to cherish.

There's a word for this, and it's not "rude" -- it's "shameful."

[Larry Ayers]

Oh, this whole situation is just pathetic! This woman has been a brain-dead vegetable for fifteen years! She's been more-or-less dead for that long! her parents are deluded. Let this heap of mindless protoplasm starve, for god's sake.

[CA]

Rude Pundit's post wasn't "rude" it was inhuman. Terry Schiavo is a human being and her parents love her. Is that so very hard to understand? Why are you so quick to accept the word of Terry's husband? Have you done any research into the way that he has treated Terry since she sustained brain damage? And if you think that this needs to be said: "If Bill Frist wanted to test her reflexes by pulling up her gown and raping her in front of the gathered media, she would not care," if you think of another human being as a "bowl of jello," if you think starving and dehyrdating someone to death is humane, perhaps you are the one who is not human.

[JR]

RP's argument for the removal of the feeding tube is an aesthetic one. Terri's continued above-ground existence offends him.

Our hostess, in contrast, advances a moral argument in her post, in which she invokes the concepts of rights and of consent. She contends that T is being forced to undergo a course of invasive treatment of a sort that she expressly rejected. This, our hostess argues, violates T's rights. If T were alive in any meaningful sense I think I might find this compelling. But she is not; in the relevant sense, she is dead. It seems less important to me to honor the rights of a dead person concerning the disposition of her body than to honor the rights of a living person to be allowed to die.

Now the aesthetics of this conclusion are rather gruesome: because T as a human being is dead, it is more rather than less morally permissible to maintain the life of the tissue of her body. This is the aesthetic result that RP rebels against.

Note that I'm not saying that the moral result is to maintain T's body, merely that the reverse is not as clearly the right thing to do as many seem to think.

By the way, there are some other interesting things going on here. RP, with his imagery of bullets to the brain, his insulting invocation of T's supposed vanity, and his fantasy of necrophiliac rape, is both sadistic and grossly misogynistic. Our hostess on the other hand, with her reference to a "non-consenting woman," purports to be defending T from a metaphorical rape. The two don't play very well together.

[Ms. Ciggy]

yuck!

[Auguste]

Terry Schiavo is a human being

Here's a question I haven't gotten a good answer to yet:

Is Terry Schiavo's soul still in her body?

If so, why is it okay to keep it trapped in an atrophied, useless (in the strictest sense of the word) shell?

If not, what's the big deal?

[Thad]

Why are you so quick to accept the word of Terry's husband?

Because there was an entire trial devoted to determining Terri's intentions, and they found "clear and convincing" evidence she would want the tube removed.

Have you done any research into the way that he has treated Terry since she sustained brain damage?

Yeah, he became a registered nurse so he could care for her.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

Michael Schiavo is constrained by the evidence. He knows that his wife didn't want a feeding tube for herself, and he has proven as much to the satisfaction of the courts.

As Terri's guardian, Michael Schiavo's job is not to make the utility-maximizing decision. Maybe Terri would have wanted sacrifice her own preferences to spare the feelings of her deluded parents. That is, it's logically possible that someone might have such a conditional preference. That would be a perfectly legitimate and even admirable position to take, but it's not one that can be inferred from Terri's behavior. All we know is that she didn't want the tube.

One could equally well argue that Terri might have bristled at the suggestion that her parents' feelings mattered more than her right to make her own decisions. She was, after all, a young adult when she made these choices. It's not absurd to think that her desire to exert autonomy might have overridden her compassion for her parents.

The bottom line is that there's no evidence that Terri would have wanted to give her body back to her parents. We can envision scenarios under which she might or might not, but at the end of the day, all we have to go on are her first-order desires: no tube.

[Thad]

JR,

In my books, Terri's parents pretty much forfeited the right to any moral consideration in this case when they started alleging that their son-in-law beat Terri into a coma and is now only trying cover up his abuse.

[JohnS]

P {font-style: italic}
"...Or perhaps loving parents who mistakenly but understandably have no faith in the white-coated authority figures of professional medicine."

They're called doctors, bro. Who exactly do you put your faith in when that brown, crusty thing on your arm gets bigger and crustier and nastier - Peggy Noonan?

[bob crane]

to comment on Mark's post: no, allowing her to die isn't to save on medical bills, it's to allow closure and dignity to someone you love that you've watch be a 'living' shell. imagine watching someone you love die and then be maintained as living tissue.

most people, young and old reiterate they wouldn't want to be kept on life support. this has gone on for more than a decade, regardless of what the parent's or husband's intentions are, no one has the right to maintain a deceased body indefinitely, it's immoral, uncaring and inhuman.

[bob crane]

clarification:
most people, young and old reiterate they wouldn't want to be kept alive, when in a vegitative state on life support.

[Jesse M.]

Someday the technology will exist to keep a body alive after the head has been cut clean off (maybe it even exists today, but no one wants to try it)--I wonder, would these same people say that a headless body is a human being who deserves all the same rights as a conscious being? Maybe they would, after all, they defend the rights of brainless zygotes...

Anyway, most of Terri's cortex has died and been replaced with cerebrospinal fluid, what's left of the cortex would not be capable of the integrated function associated with consciousness (see this entry from Carl Zimmer's blog on brain activity in 'minimally conscious states' vs. 'permanent vegetative states'), the only part of her brain that's functioning is the brainstem. To be a bit rude myself, the fact that Terri's isolated brainstem can still make her body behave in ways reminiscent of a conscious human being is comparable to the case of Mike the headless chicken who continued walking around, attempting to crow and preen his feathers, etc., long after his head was lopped off (the cut was apparently high enough that the brainstem was left intact).

[jpe]

Is Terry Schiavo's soul still in her body?

I was wondering that myself. Is her soul now as retarded as her mind? Or is there a fully cognizant soul somewhere in there? The former must be problematic for believers in the soul, since the soul is allegedly immutable. If the latter, hasn't anyone seen Johhny Got His Gun?

[Lux Tromhorn]

You yanks have lost it. The woman is dead- period.

[CaryinTN]

This is very sad... I watched my grandmother die last year, and know that dragging this thing out just makes it more painful, please let this woman go... if people really want to get worked into a lather over life and death, there are plenty of africans to worry about.

[Muy L0c0]

The Repuglicans using Ms. Schiavo as a political football under the guise of "superior morality" is without doubt the most dispicable display of insensitive self-aggrandizing demigogery I have seen in 30 years of watching our "representatives" in Washington act out. I save the last circle of hell for Tom "Bugman" Delay who is emmulating his former foes by scuttling away beneath a fog of hypocritcal clap-trap while he continues to feed at the public trough. Disgusting.

Legally, Mr. Schiavo as her guardian, despite his questionable relationship etiquette, is empowered by Florida law to make the decision for his incapacitated wife. My she rest in peace. And may the rest of you write living wills.

[peBird]

It become more and more clear that the right worships the hindbrain - the source of easily manipulated emotions and basic body functions. In this sense, Schiavo does represent "life" to them. The fact that the cortex is gone has little meaning to them - reason and rational thought have little import in their world.

[Dan Schneider]

Don't know if any of you saw C-Span this afternoon where Tom DeLay, of all people, questioned Mr. Schiavo's ethics as a husband. Apparently the fact that he wd not consent to have his comatose wife brought out into the park for no reason makes him an evil man. It was one of the most disgusting displays of arrogance and hypocrisy I've ever witnessed. If I were Schiavo I'd call out DeLay as a sack of shit and kick his ass all the wat back to Texas.

[CD318]

JR - it doesn't take a whole lot of specialized expertise (and yes, as a matter of fact I AM a full-time faculty member at a top-20 US medical school) to evaluate a case in which much of the space formerly occupied by a person's cerebral cortex are currently filled with cerebrospinal fluid.

By the way: if you'd worried about this case instead, you might have done some actual good:
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3087387

We now return you to Representative DeLay's imminent indictment.

[Diana]

Lindsay,

I agree with you about the Schiavo case.

But Rudepundit's analysis was a nauseating hate-filled rant. This is the kind of garbage that the rabid right likes to point to and say, "See? This is what the left is all about."

Nope, I totally disassociate myself from Rudepundit, who tells it like it isn't.

Diana