Pillow Girl

[bridgetester]

[Please read the whole article before making comments]

Tragic girl, 9, is 'frozen in time'http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=31489&in_page_id=34Read more... )

Comments

[ebongreen]

I heard about this a week or two ago on NPR.

I don't like any of it. It reeks of "doing something because we can". We can keep this severely cognitively-impaired child alive, so we do. We can render her sterile and of a "manageable" size, so we will.

How is this that much different from how Terry Schiavo lived on her feeding tubes for ten years? Just because her parents want her alive, while Michael Schiavo thought Terry's body should die, this small permanent child receives tens of thousands of dollars of medical intervention - and to what end?

What happens when her parents die - who will take care of her then? What sort of life will she live - if you call permanent mental infancy (and now permanent physical prepubescence) a life?

If this is where "a culture of life" intends to take us, I don't want to go.

[leora]

Terry Schiavo's brain was liquifying inside her skull. She was unable to process anything going on around her. She was basically dead.

This child has extremely limited brain power. I think the estimate given was that of a 3 month old. But this child has sentience. This child reacts to things. This child has as much brain power as a 3 month old... and we don't generally kill 3 month olds or let them die.

To me, there is a huge difference between keeping someone with no brain power alive and keeping someone of very limited brain power alive. And it is arguments like yours that scare people and make them unwilling to unplug Terry, because they're afraid of that slippery slope to people who just aren't as aware or aren't as smart. I see much good and no bad in this kid living. She is having a life. She is experiencing it. She won't experience it at the depth that I will, but quite frankly, neither will most people. But her experiences will be her experiences and valid ones.

[ebongreen]

...this child has sentience. This child reacts to things.

Sentience and the ability to react to stimuli are two different things. Is a plant sentient because it reacts to the presence of light? Not in any conventional legal sense, though in spiritual eyes it may very well be.

This child has as much brain power as a 3 month old... and we don't generally kill 3 month olds or let them die.

We routinely kill pets (non-genetically human companions) that are a heck of a lot smarter than the average three-month-old human. We permit the death of proto-humans through legal or extra-legal abortion, and you don't seem to know much about the history and practice of infanticide. Who's this "we" you're talking about?

And it is arguments like yours that scare people and make them unwilling to unplug Terry, because they're afraid of that slippery slope to people who just aren't as aware or aren't as smart.Another reason arguments like mine frighten people is that those people seem to want to not deal with issues around mortality and society. Who'

[leora]

I believe that a plant shouldn't be killed without a good reason. I believe that someone who deliberately goes around killing plants simply because they can is evil. However, I believe that the wellbeing of humans is more important than the wellbeing of a plant, so if a plant needs to be killed to support that, I'm okay with that. It gets dodgier if you're talking about the extinction of an entire species.

We routinely kill pets when they are suffering. Someone who killed a pet who wasn't suffering because it was simply more convenient for them to do so would generally be viewed as a bad person, at least by me and people I know. If you choose to have a pet, you choose to take on the responsibility of that pet. That's significant. Similarly, if you choose to have a child, you accept whatever you get. That's scary, but that's the way it works. If that really bothers you, you can try to do pre-screening and implantation of a healthier fertilized egg and selective abortion partway through pregnancy, but after a certain point, you've got

[leora]

Do we have any evidence that the child is unhappy or suffering? The child can't walk or talk, but the child does seem to have some ability to express. And the child can perceive, and is being given experiences that sound fairly pleasant.

I do think that a person with severely limited brain power is much more like a pet in many ways. But this seems to be more like a pet who requires a lot of care that not everyone would be willing to do, not like a pet who is suffering.

I really don't like the assumption that the child would be better off dead without a good deal of evidence to back that up.

[moonfall]

i've worked with people who were in a constant child-like state like that, and i'm sure wasn't an easy decision for them. i think the only thing that irks me about these situations is people having knee-jerk reactions that they think they know better when they've never had to live with a 70 lb. infant 18 hours out of every day.

[bluemoonshark]

I read this in the Seattle Times the other day and the only thing I could think was "how dare any 'medical ethicists'" stand on a pedastal and judge these parents for trying to make their daughter as happy and as comfortable as possible.

I can't imagine how awful having a brain damaged child would be, but hope (however improbably) that I would have as much love as those parents have and be able to love the child anyway, rather than institutionalize her and try again.

[rainbow_goddess]

This is one of those grey areas that I have a lot of trouble with.

On the one hand, I think that doing all these expensive, complicated medical procedures to keep this girl a child is rather sick.

On the other hand, I can sympathize with the parents wanting to do whatever is necessary to make it easier to care for her, since she won't be able to care for herself.

Since it's not a situation I've ever been in, I don't think I can really comment on it fairly.