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Terri Schiavo case introduction
Terri Schiavo case brief
Terri Schiavo case brief
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“From Private Ordeal to National Fight: The Case of Terri Schiavo” by Clyde Haberman (2014) he explains the dilemma of Terri Schiavo. A twenty-six year old, Terri Schiavo, mysteriously collapsed due to her brain being deprived of oxygen for to long. She was then put in a persistent vegetative state, where in the article it states “ She could breath without mechanical assistance. But doctors concluded that she was incapable of thought or emotion.” Her parents wanted her to be kept alive while her husband knew Terri wouldn’t. In the article it claims “ Florida courts, while sympathizing with the parents, consistently sided with the husband as a matter of law.” Although the courts sided with Michael, the Florida politicians felt differently. “
Emilio is terminally ill and is under the care of the Children’s Hospital in Texas. He is placed on life support by a respirator and is given pills causing the child to spend majority of his time in the pediatric intensive care unit unconscious. Showing no signs of improvement, the physician has requested the parents look for another hospital willing to continue aiding Emilio within a period of 10 days. Under the Texas “futile-care” law, the hospital’s ethics committee can, “declare the care of a terminally ill patient to be of no benefit,” allowing them to terminate care after a given time period. (Moreno, Sylvia. Case Puts Futile-Treatment Law Under a Microscope.
The case had a many important questions to it. In one question: is physician-assisted suicide morally, ethically, legally correct, and/or fair to anyone?
There are many ethical paradigms through which humans find guidance and justification for their own actions. In the case of contractarianism, citizens of a state are entitled to human rights, considered to be unalienable, and legal rights, which are both protected by the state. As Spinello says, “The problem with most rights-based theories is that they do not provide adequate criteria for resolving practical disputes when rights are in conflict” (14). One case that supports Spinello is the case of Marlise Munoz, a brain-dead, pregnant thirty-three year old, who was wrongly kept on life support for nearly two months at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas. Misinterpretation of the Texas Advance Directives Act by John Peter Smith Hospital led to the violation of the contractarian paradigm.
How it relates to healthcare: The child’s injuries proved severe, and Bedner faced a long prison sentence if convicted,but he didn’t face murder charges.As his critically ill daughter,C.B. remained on life support the hospital sought to exclude Bender from decisions regarding from life support. The girl eventually did die, but the case generated considerable public debate and stimulated a controversy among bioethics scholars .
In February of 1990 a woman named Terri Schiavo collapsed at home suffering cardiac arrest in her home in St. Petersburg, Florida. She was resuscitated but had severe brain damage because she had no oxygen going to her brain for several minutes. Terri was severely brain damaged and in a vegetative state but could still breathe and maintain a heart beat on her own. After two and a half months and no signs of improvement, impaired vision, and the inability to move her arms and legs she needed a feeding tube to sustain her life since she seemed to be in a persistent vegetative state. For 2 years doctors attempted speech and physical therapy with no success. In 1998 Schiavos husband claimed she would not want to live in that quality of life without a prospect of recovery so he tried several times over the course of many years to pull the feeding tube so she could pass. Bob and Mary Schindler challenged and fought for a
Terri Schiavo is a forty year old women who had a severe heart attack 15 years ago which resulted in brain damage. She had no living will so there is no legal document of what she would have wanted if she became brain damage and couldn’t function on her own but her husband, Michael Schiavo, says that after 15 years of being on a feeding tube she would have wanted to die. The question is should he have the right to remove the feeding tube? Anybody who knows me will know that my answer is no! The reason for that is because I am a Christian and I do not believe in terminating someone’s life. It’s my belief that as long as a persons heart is beating he or she stills has life in them.
In her essay “A Feminist Defense of Abortion” Sally Markowitz addresses the Autonomy defense as not being feminist in nature. She comes to this conclusion by recognizing that the right to bodily autonomy is not just a female right but a right that is innate for every person, male or female. Markowitz then asserts that the human right to bodily autonomy in regard to abortion should not be a gender neutral defense. Many feminists have come to the conclusion that the Autonomy Defense works against women in the courts as it shifts the focus away from gender inequality. Feminists have adopted the belief that sometimes gender should be relevant in claiming rights. To fail to claim a right on the basis of gender in the situation of abortion would obscure the relationship between reproductive practices and their oppression.
Thomson provides the example of being hooked up for nine months to provide dialysis to an ailing violinist to expose how a fetus’s right to life does not supersede a mother’s right to make medical decisions about her body (48-49). I find that this thought experiment especially helpful in understanding how even though a fetus does have a right to life, because the continuation of their life hinges on the consent of their mother to use her body, it falls to the mother to choose whether or not to allow the fetus to develop to term.
“I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.” What author Henry James meant by this was that it is better to make up one’s mind and have an opinion than to remain complacent, such as the case of Mary Anne Warren. Warren’s arguments for abortion’s possible permissibility are lacking in substance. The aim of my paper is to discuss Warren’s insufficient criteria for personhood and address the problem with her concept of potential personhood.
St. Olaf College's theme for Women's History Month is "Women in Politics." The featured guest speaker was Sarah Weddington, the attorney who, in 1973, argued the winning side of Roe vs. Wade before the United States Supreme Court. This decision significantly influenced women's reproductive rights by overturning the Texas interpretation of abortion law and making abortion legal in the United States.
The topic of my paper is abortion. In Judith Jarvis Thomson's paper, “A Defense of Abortion,” she presented a typical anti-abortion argument and tried to prove it false. I believe there is good reason to agree that the argument is sound and Thompson's criticisms of it are false.
In the article 'A Defense of Abortion' Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that abortion is morally permissible even if the fetus is considered a person. In this paper I will give a fairly detailed description of Thomson main arguments for abortion. In particular I will take a close look at her famous 'violinist' argument. Following will be objections to the argumentative story focused on the reasoning that one person's right to life outweighs another person's right to autonomy. Then appropriate responses to these objections. Concluding the paper I will argue that Thomson's 'violinist' argument supporting the idea of a mother's right to autonomy outweighing a fetus' right to life does not make abortion permissible.
Because the Missouri Supreme Court ruled against the removal of Nancy Cruzan’s artificial hydration and nutrition on the grounds that “clear and convincing” evidence of Nancy’s wishes was not provided, the Cruzan family appealed the decision to the United States Supreme Court arguing that Nancy was being deprived of her right to refuse medical treatment. The Supreme Court ruling affirmed that competent patients have the right to refuse unwanted medical treatment, but also noted that incompetent patients are not capable of exercising this right. Consequently, states may establish their own safe-guards to govern cases in which a substituted decision maker wishes to refuse treatment for an incompetent patient. This ruling therefore upheld the decision of Missouri’s Supreme Court.
Politically this case is still praised all the time. On the 41st anniversary of this case, President Obama stated “We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman's access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom” . Abortion opponents make up the most significant element of the Republican Party. The abortion conflict has introduced an element into political discourse that is very ugly. A U.S. senator called for the execution of abortion providers and at least three states introduced the “justifiable homicide” laws which intend to cover killings committed in the defense of an “unborn child” however none of these laws have been passed to date . After the murder of George Tiller, an abortion doctor who was shot and killed in a Kansas church, abortion rights supporters in the U.S. Senate have not been able to pass a resolution condemning this act. Some people think that Roe v. Wade was a right to abortion before the American public was ready for it because there...
One of the most famous court cases is Roe v. Wade. Which was filed in 1971 by Norma McCorvey otherwise known as Jane Roe sued Henry Wade, because he “enforced that prohibits abortion, except when the women’s life is a stake” (Cornell). Roe was pregnant and wanted an abortion in Texas, but “Texas state laws consider abortion as a criminal offense, except when the mother’s life is in danger” (Cornell). Since her life was not in any dange...