Teri Schiavo Essay

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Terri Schiavo's Case: Who was ethically correct? Bianka Rodriguez Keiser University July 18, 2014 Talking about ethical issues can become a very controversial topic since it varies between people's culture, belief and point of view among other aspects. Terri Schiavo was a young woman who suffered a massive cardiac arrest that affected her brain's function secondary to lack of oxygen and consequently she ended up in a Pervasive Vegetative State ( PVS). Terri was married and her husband was her legal guardian after her disability even though her parents were always very involved in her health care. After a demand Terri's husband won for a malpractice sue from one of the many surgical procedure she had to face in their trials to stimulate her brain and try to recover some function, a whole storm of family discrepancies, legal issues in courts and also the hand of politicians covered their lives. After 8 years of hardly trying to do everything for Terri's recovery with no signs of hope or just the minimum improvement , her husband ask to remove the Percutaneous Endoscopic Gastrostomy (PEG), which is a “ flexible tube placed through the abdominal wall and into the stomach that allows nutrition, fluids and/or medications to be put directly into the stomach” 2 . This PEG tube was maintaining Terri alive preventing malnutrition and dehydration. According to Terri's husband, she would not want to live in that condition and this was expressed in court after court. In an article published in 2005 , Dr. Joseph J. Fins stated that “this was a right-to-die case”. He considered that the fact that Terri had the feeding tube removed and reinserted again in two occasions prior to the last one when she die approximately fifteen days after, was irreversible invasive and a violation of her rights 5. For anybody, situations like this case are stressful and very sad, also
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