Are these states guilty of interfering with a woman's rights to decisions regarding her own body or are they acting in the woman's best interests? There is something instinctually disgusting about being raped while in a coma and kept on life support so your obligation in the "culture of life" as an incubator is fulfilled.
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The predicament bears similarities to that endured by the family of a 29-year-old woman who was raped in a Rochester nursing home in 1995 while in a coma-like state.
It was the first known case in medical history where a woman in a chronic vegetative state become pregnant and gave birth, doctors said. The family decided to raise the child, who survived. The mother died a few days before the boy's first birthday.
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Pregnant, brain-dead woman is kept alive on ventilator Insult to injury if the Rochester woman was pro-choice. If that was me, despite my diligence to forgo motherhood and my family's awareness of my position on abortion the states would make it all too easy to bring about an outcome I was never party to before entering a PVS to the bright-eyed delight of my daffy mother.
If the woman is pregnant before falling into a coma or is raped and fervently pro-choice, I don't see a problem with prolonging life support. This raises another point of contention with the question of "was she or wasn't she" before she fell ill. I don't care that my state views a forced birthing in "my best interests." I am going to outline my wishes under this condition regardless in the will and write my congressmen.
With so many right-to-life advocates eschewing a culture of death, after getting a sample of the Schiavo legal circus, death seems preferable to new people looking into wills.
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Arlington lawyer Kelly Thompson said the Schiavo case came up immediately yesterday when she was meeting with a couple for routine estate planning and began listing the documents they would need.
"Before I could even finish the sentence, they said, 'and a medical directive -- don't let me be the next Terri Schiavo,' " Thompson said.
Matt Snow, a Leesburg lawyer, said that in the past week, about two of 10 clients who are getting living wills have mentioned the case as "their motivating factor" in drawing up the document. And Falls Church lawyer John Laster said he expects the peak is yet to come.
"The big brouhaha has only started these last few days," he said. "I feel confident that every new client who comes in this week is going to bring it up."
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Battle Prompts A New Interest In Living WillsI hope we never have to go through a
Roe Schiavo.
Some interesting, if depressing information: living wills may not be enough;
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The best patients can do, the researchers argue, is to use a "durable power of attorney" to appoint someone to make decisions for them when they can no longer make their own decisions.
"Our review shows that the evidence about living wills demonstrates that they fail all five tests that would have to be passed for them to work," says co-author Angela Fagerlin, Ph.D., a research scientist with the U-M Medical School and VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System.
"First, most people don’t even have living wills. Second, those who do rarely know what care they would truly want in some hypothetical future. Third, it’s surprisingly hard for people to state their wishes accurately and understandably. Fourth, the document is often unavailable when decisions need to be made. Fifth, even when it is available, surrogate decision makers usually cannot reliably apply its instructions to the patient’s current health condition."
Co-author Carl Schneider, a U-M Law School and Medical School professor comments, "Living wills don’t fail for lack of effort, education, intelligence, or good will. They fail because of basic traits of human psychology."
For instance, studies show that people have great trouble predicting their own preferences about even simple, everyday things, like what snacks they will want or what groceries they will buy next week. "If they have trouble predicting what is familiar," asks Schneider, "why should we expect them to succeed when they are predicting what they will want in circumstances they have never experienced and can’t foretell?"
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Living Wills Not the Best Choice, Study Says