Hope I'm not coming off self-righteous. I dealt with this issue when my Mom died after a terrible accident and a month in a burn unit. It was very painful. I might be wrong about Michael and the rehab therapy. If so I apologize and I mean no personal judgements about the husband or any particular glorification of the parents. I don't know any of them personally.
In any individual case, I believe, it an individual matter. Like a woman's right to chose.
The problem is cultural and institutional.
Institutional -- in terms of care for people who are adults and severely disabled. There is a great financial incentive for institutions to cut off care. This makes this case problematic as a media frame of "persistent vegetative state" means a diagnosis that makes it okay to starve someone.
--In terms of the economic support our society provides for disabled folks and their families, (this includes the baby issue)
Cultural -- in terms of the stigma and fear around disability. That's the issues I don't see widely discussed about this specific situation which is currently so media saturated, we discuss people as stereotypes-- which I slipped into when talking about Terry's husband. Again, apologies.
adrienne
At 11:32 AM -0500 3/25/05, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
At 8:13 AM -0800 3/25/05, adrienne lauby wrote:Do you know that Terri's husband has refused for all these years to let her have any kind of rehabilitation therapy?
I believe that's not true. If anything, it seems that Michael Schiavo has been needlessly vilified by those who do not know him. I posted a relevant article about the husband at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050321/005897.html>, as the same question came up there also.
It reminds me of the huge argument on LBO a while back, reproductive rights versus the inclination of some pregnant women to discontinue pregnancy because the the expectation was that the child would be disabled or not 'normal' in some other respect. As everybody knows, in Third World countries and who knows where else, some pregnancies are discontinued because the fetus is female.
It doesn't pay for anybody to get too self-righteous about this, IMO.
