Posted on 03/23/2009 2:18:23 PM PDT by wagglebee
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- New York Times health columnist Jane Brody is coming under fire for referring to Terri Schiavo as a vegetable in a recent interview. The comment has one bioethicist upset -- saying the term neither confers the dignity and humanity patients deserve nor is medically accurate.
Speaking the need for elderly people and terminally ill patients to begin planning for death, Brody told the Times that it is never to early to begin considering end-of-life plans.
"You don't have to be old. If you recall, Terri Schiavo was 26 when she suffered a heart attack that deprived her brain of oxygen and left her a living vegetable for 15 years, at great cost and trauma to her family," she said.
But Wesley J. Smith, a noted author and attorney, considers the comments a catachresis and that the term "vegetable" is an offense similar to racial slurs.
"Terri Schiavo was not a carrot or a turnip," he responds. "She was a human being with a profound cognitive disability. Calling her a "V" demeans her and dehumanizes her moral worth as a human being--just as the odious "N-word" does people with dark skin."
"It should never be used among enlightened people. Indeed, we need to grow as a culture so that anyone using it is treated with the same disdain by polite society as we do now to anyone who uses the crude 'N' epithet," he explains.
Smith says the demeaning term also offends Terri's family, who went out of their way to do everything they legally could to care for her and provide her proper medical care and treatment.
"Terri's family was certainly grief stricken over her injury--the precise cause of which will never be known. But that is not what so badly traumatized them, and it is not what extracted a 'great cost,'" Smith said.
"Those inflictions came from the horror they felt--and still feel--because they were not permitted to care for her for the rest of her life in order to, instead, slowly dehydrate her to death by court order to the applause of much of society," Smith adds.
He concludes: "Brody needs to get a clue as to both her facts and her lexicon."
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Would the “vegetable” be able to be offended?
I think not.
Some people are moral vegetables. Or is that an affront to cabbages, which haven’t hurt anyone?
Focusing on the term "Vegetable", distracts from the crux of the piece.
Democrats, in their rush to create the USSA, want to cut certain expenditures (like social security and medicare), to free the money for use elsewhere (like government employee green jobs and a civilian security force made up of gang members).
The statement, "Old people have a responsibility to die", will become, "People over the age of ___, have a responsibility to die".
Yes, it can happen here.
2) Some people seem to have a hard time understanding that as a result of certain kinds of brain trauma, there is not enough brain left to support personality or identity.
Autopsy report:
www.blogsforterri.com/archives/5050439_autopsy%20report%20and%20supporting%20documents.pdf
CT scan:
Do you have a brain of someone else who was deprived of hydration for 13 days to compare Terri’s to? If not, this is irrelevant.
“2) Some people seem to have a hard time understanding that as a result of certain kinds of brain trauma, there is not enough brain left to support personality or identity.”
Interesting since Terri interacted with people, especially her parents up until they were no longer allowed to see her.
I agree, there was really nothing left.
A starved brain, pure and simple!
This alone should have been enough to place her care givers in prison for the rest of their lives.
What do you do to attract such low-lifes to your threads? You’ve got one that thinks if somebody doesn’t speak English it’s okay to call them the “N” word, or whatever other ugly names they can think up, because the person they’re trying to insult doesn’t know they’re being insulted.
Then you have a couple of them that think comparing different types of images of different parts of different brains proves something that is completely unrelated to any of the images.
And these morons all agree that anyone with a brain function at or below a level that just happens to be higher than their own should be ridiculed, insulted, humiliated, tortured and murdered. And they think that’s all well and good, because the victims don’t understand. And the morons don’t see the irony.
So, you are fully prepared to grant a court authority to end you life because someone can make an argument that the quality of your life does not meet a certain standard?
As I noted below, they seem content to allow a court to sentence them to death one day if someone who hates them decides to go that route.
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