The Terri Schiavo Case

Throughout our lives, we face many situations that pose different ethical issues. Whether these situations are personal, or world wide, they are always here. A certain issue that has caught the public’s attention is The Death with Dignity Act. Death with Dignity involved a woman, named Brittany Maynard. Regarding all ethical issues, people may support things, while some people may not. Brittany’s decision was ethical and changed her life forever. From this, I determined that this decision was through rights - based ethics.

If I had to make the decision on what to do in Terri Schaivo’s case I would do what Michael Schiavo had done, I would fight to have the feeding tube removed. I believe that if a person has no quality of life and is in a PVS state, they have no feelings, they feel no pain, and they are not aware of their surroundings. According to the article Terri Schiavo and End-of-Life Decisions “Terri could not continue both to be alive and be free from invasive medical procedures” (Mathes, 2005) I feel keeping them alive is unfair to them and to their loved ones. I also believe that the surrogate decision maker should follow the “best interest” standard, which is, given the medical facts and prognosis, make decisions that would be in the best interests of the patient. (Hook & Mueller, 2005) There was a lot of evidence and proof from the doctors in regards to the fact that Terri was not going to get better, there were no medical interventions left that could help her. Prolonging treatment for Terri would not have changed her quality of life or made it better. In my opinion, Michael Schiavo acted properly as a surrogate decision maker because first of all, he followed her previously spoken wishes and views and, second of all, he acted in her

The horrible Nazi doctors experimented on Jews by freezing them, then trying to revitalize them. They were trying to find the best way to revive German Pilots after they jumped into icy water. They didn’t want to experiment on the pilots themselves and have them die, so they experimented on terrified, starving children. They would either put them outside naked in freezing cold weather, or put them in an icy tank

Michael Schiavo believes that his wife is being made to suffer, and that her present status has robbed her of any remaining dignity. Terri’s parents believe that their daughter has been denied the opportunity to recover, and that with treatment she can enjoy a reasonable quality of life. The legal battle continues today with doctors disagreeing about Terri’s medical status, prospects for recovery and appropriate interventions. In the meantime, Terri remains attached to a feeding tube, spending her life in a medical institution totally incapacitated and unable to participate in the decisions concerning her very life.

Schiavo accepted the doctors diagnosis of persistent vegetative and decided he wanted to remove her from the ventilator (Quill, 2005). The article says he was recalling prior statements that his wife had made, such as “I don’t want to be kept alive on a machine” (Quill, 2005). This is the part where things get tricky. Terri’s parents (the Schindler family) disagreed and did not accept the diagnosis, they believed that Ms. Schiavo’s condition would improve if they continued to provide rehabilitative treatment (citation).

The ethical principles for nurses to practice with beneficence and no maleficence. This legal battle between Terri Schiavo’s husband and her family was an ethical debate between continuing artificial life or remove her feeding tube by the request of her husband. Using the theories of utilitarianism and deontology can be applied or considered in making the most ethically correct resolution. The cases are very complex and raise many moral and ethical issues. The cases have brought awareness to society of “the importance of discussing end-of-life issues with family members and underscores how an advance directive, a living will and/or durable power of attorney for health care, are a healthcare proxy clarifies and provides evidence of the wishes of an individual regarding end-of-life decisions. Terri Schiavo should impress upon laypersons and professionals alike the uncertainty of the context in which issues of continuation and termination are argued ethically. Nobody knows what Mrs. Schiavo would have wanted. She left no advance directive and in its absence her husband says one thing and her parents

Terri Schiavo had a cardiac arrest triggered by hypokalemia, which means that she had low levels of potassium in her blood. The cardiac arrest deprived oxygen of her brain and put her in a coma. Many doctors diagnosed her as a persistent vegetative state. Ever since she collapsed on February 25, 1990, she has been on a feeding tube until March 18, 2005.

Throughout the Holocaust torture was used by many Nazis in order to get the Jewish prisoners to do something or give information. Torture has always been an element of Fascism, and Amery argues that “...torture was not an accidental quality of this Third Reich, but its essence”. He continues to even say that if torture were removed from Fascism, there would be nothing left. In Hitler’s Germany, Nazis tortured for information, “but in addition they tortured with good conscience of depravity”, meaning they were aware of the moral corruption it was causing, all in all “they tortured because they were torturers”. Nazis purposefully placed torture in their ways, but became

Terri Schiavo was 26 years old when she collapsed in her home and suffered acute hypoxia for several minutes. Slightly shy of a year after her injury, it was clinically determined that she was in a persistent vegetative state (Perry, Churchill, & Kirshner, 2005). There were no legal documents, such as an advance directive or living will, specifying the wishes for care under such circumstances. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, was designated as her legal guardian. The Schiavo case caught the public’s attention when her husband elected to remove her feeding tube in the mid 1900’s. He understood that there has never been a case of recovery after a year of being in a persistent vegetative state. One of the moral issues surrounding the case centered on the appropriateness of removing the life-sustaining feeding tube or maintaining it. Throughout the case, there has

One of these experiments conducted on prisoners dealt with freezing. The doctors were looking for ways to care for pilots who had to eject into icy water. To do this they put prisoners in tubs of freezing water wearing only aviator suits or nothing at all, and sometimes for up to 5 hours. Other prisoners were forced outside and stripped down to the nude in the freezing weather. Another experiment was infecting prisoners with tuberculosis in an effort to find a cure. German doctors were trying to find if anybody was immune to the disease so they could study them and come up with a cure. However, a doctor by the name of Kurt Heissmeyer directly injected the disease into prisoners at a concentration camp which resulted in the death of at least 200 people. Forcing Gypsies to live off of nothing but sea water was another torturous study conducted on concentration camp prisoners. Hans Eppinger, another German doctor, tried to make seawater consumable. He forced ninety Gypsies to participate in this study. Some victims reportedly licked a recently washed floor just to get some fresh water. All these experiments resulted in either serious bodily harm, or death. Most of the evidence to these experiments was

Torture: The Tool of Mind Control “By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as a paradise” (Adolf Hitler Quotes). Being the leader of one of the greatest superpowers in the world, this gave Adolf Hitler the upper hand in creating his own utopia where the average civilian would live under his rule, and anyone that did not fit the category of his preference or rebelled the government would be murdered or tortured until they shared the same mindset as their leader. Hitler persuaded many German’s to hate the Jewish population because - in his opinion - they didn’t qualify as “the perfect race”.

They were the subjects of public disputes with family members, court systems, medical professionals, the media, and society at large. Terri Schiavo, Nancy Cruzan and Karen Ann Quinlan; their names are synonymous with permanent vegetative state (PVS). The amazing technological advancements in modern medicine has been credited with keeping persons alive who in times past would have died, therefore this is remarkable for countless families. In the cases of the Quinlan’s, the Cruzan’s and many like them, families members find it unbearable to witness loved ones who linger indefinitely in PVS with little or no chance for recovery. There are many like Terri Schiavo’s parents, who value the lives of their love ones no matter how limited their

(Terri Schiavo Case, 2016). Her husband made his decision based on the ethical system of mercy for the living dead and the patient’s desire to die. To him, her not being able to function meant she was dead and her feeding tube was delaying the inevitable. He also felt she would want to die if she was able to communicate it.

The history of torture in Europe may seem at first to be a steady progression of barbarous tactics, leading from one social purge to the next, but this is not completely the case. Torture has been used in a progression from primitive methods to the present more modern styles. It has also developed extensively, both in severity and variety of methods used. But in the end, torture has gone full circle; modern forms of torture are more like those methods used by savages than anything in between. Overall, the severity of torture has fluctuated, growing and receding with the passing of each new time period, but eventually reverting to its original state.

Lastly, the Jewish prisoners were sometimes tortured or experimented on as lab rats, displayed by the famous inhumane experiment to create conjoined twins carried out by Josef Mengele. Jewish people were put through great misery for the duration of the Holocaust.