Terri Schiavo's autopsy, and where we go from here

"The autopsy found that her brain was so severely damaged that no amount of therapy would have helped to regenerate it. Schiavo's parents had repeatedly said their daughter was responsive to them and could have been helped with therapy.

"'She would not have been able to form any cognitive thought,' said Dr. Stephen Nelson, a forensic pathologist who assisted in the autopsy. 'There was a massive loss of brain tissue.'"

Some apologies would be appropriate now, it seems, as well as re-thinking how we handle things like this in the future.

Terri Schiavo's autopsy appears to show she really was seriously brain-damaged:

"'She would not have been able to form any cognitive thought,' said Dr. Stephen Nelson, a forensic pathologist who assisted in the autopsy. 'There was a massive loss of brain tissue.'"

This would be a good time for those who insisted she must be healthy enough to recover someday, or who thought her husband had abused her, to offer apologies. I'm not talking about her parents--I wouldn't presume to speak to what they went through, or what they saw--but about everyone else who made firm pronouncements from all over the country on what should be done with her.

It would also be a good time for us to take a more sane, dispassionate look at how society makes these decisions, including how much society should get involved. I don't think we did it very well last time. It became just as binary as most other highly politicized topics seem to have become recently. Both sides of the question seemed to take their position, dig in their heels, and to shout a lot.

Don't get me wrong--followers of Christ need to know what we believe and stand there firmly. Sometimes the way that works out in real life isn't so black and white, though. We know we place a high, sacred value on life, and we'll hold to that tenaciously. If we have to err, we'll choose to err on the side of life rather than death, every time. I agreed with Charles Colson at the time that there were too many questions to allow it to end in such a state of doubt. In the same circumstances I would probably say the same again.

It turns out Terri's husband was right, and for his sake I'm glad he wasn't proved wrong. I'm glad even for Terri's sake, in a different way, since we now have reason to think she didn't suffer from the dehydration and etc.

Anyway, this is wishful thinking, but it would be nice if we could do this without such rancor next time.

Footnote added 7:45 pm: I understand there are some who say we should not take the autopsy at face value. Some--I've heard one already this evening--continue to say Terri's husband is a dishonest manipulator; some even may think he's guilty of hurting her without leaving physical evidence. I'm hoping we can just leave all that out of this discussion of how to handle these sorts of things. The public has to work with the information we've reliably received. Those who are close to the case can continue to pursue those questions if they care to do so.

Posted: Wed - June 15, 2005 at 03:27 PM |

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson getCategoryName("<$CategoryUUID$>");

Terri Schiavo's autopsy, and where we go from here

Thinking Christian by Tom Gilson