Op-Ed: Let’s Stop Treating Injured and Sick People Like ‘Vegetables’

By Bobby Schindler / Tom Shakely)
 for The Western Journal


It’s a simple reality that many patients who are not actively dying are nonetheless described as facing “end of life” issues, often simply due to physical or cognitive disabilities.

This is particularly true for patients diagnosed with “Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome,” the terminology doctors and patient advocates increasingly prefer to the more pejorative “Persistent Vegetative State” language — though both describe patients with diminished autonomy.

Why would one’s disabilities cause some medical challenges to be termed “end of life” issues? Our modern, utilitarian-minded culture judges one’s “quality of life” by asking “What can you do?” And if it’s judged that you can’t “do” enough, your “quality of life” is said to be “poor” and what for others would be considered basic health issues become strangely re-characterized as “end of life” issues.

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Bobby Schindler is president of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network and an associate scholar with the Charlotte Lozier Institute. Tom Shakely is executive director of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network.

 

The Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network upholds human dignity through service to the medically vulnerable.

We express this mission through public advocacy of essential qualities of human dignity—which include the right to food and water, the presumption of the will to live, due process against denial of care, protection from euthanasia as a form of medicine, and access to rehabilitative care—as well as through 24/7 Crisis Lifeline service to at-risk patients and families.  For more information or to make a donation to help them with their work, please use this link.