Saturday, June 11, 2005

The Culture of Death -- Looking Back at Terri Schiavo

http://www.crosswalk.com/news/weblogs/mohler/?adate=6/10/2005#1334807

[Crosswalk.com] June 10, 2005--Paul McHugh finds all this to be quite unsatisfactory. University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University, McHugh revisits Terri Schiavo's case and sees even deeper dangers. In "Annihilating Terri Schiavo," published in the June 2005 issue of Commentary, McHugh argues that public attention was largely diverted from the opinions, experience, and judgment of doctors and nurses "who customarily provide care to patients like Terri Schiavo." Accordingly, "few people appear to have grasped that the way she died was most unusual. That, instead, it has been widely understood to be not only a proper but also a perfectly commonsensical way to die, a way approved of by most doctors and nurses, can only be explained by a deep change that has taken place over the last decades in our thinking about how to care for the helpless and disabled among us."

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