Question:
I once saw an interesting documentary on brain trauma and brain damage. It seems that an awful lot of people are completely ignorant of the nature of brain damage and think that comatose and brain damaged patients can somehow just wake up some day and be OK again. In the case of this 13 year vegetable, they think she can learn to swallow again with enough therapy. The reality is that once a person has been brain-damaged *badly enough*, they never return to normal or even a recognizable fascimile of their former self, ever. Yet, people think there are miracles all the time that disprove this fact. There aren't such miracles. If there is a god, he seems remarkably uninterested in doing anything about cases of severe brain damage and brain trauma. Why does the government have the right to force this family to let theirdaughter die? So what if she never learns to swallow. Why does that givethe government the right to kill people?

Answer: I'm also pro life... But if this woman is truly 'brain dead' and she is only being kept alive by machines, then switching off the machines to me isn't 'killing' her, as she isn't really alive.

The government isn't killing anyone... What they are doing is allowing a husband to stop his wife being kept artificially 'alive'. I guess it depends on how you define alive.... If you took someone that had very recently died, you could probably make their heart beat and their lungs breath artificially, but are they still alive? From what i've read, this woman was brain dead. If on the other hand her brain was still somehow alive, then I agree that the feeding tube shouldn't be removed.

Otherwise we would have to rush to every single fallen bird, every beached whale, every dying man or woman and apply CPR, inject stimulative chemicals directly into their heart, etc., until several hours after their heart has stopped beating and their brain has stopped all electrical activity, since there is still a chance of of remaining alive if those measures are taken up to that point. That woman is gone. Forever. She is never coming back, feeding tube or no feeding tube. Face the music. By the way, the videos I've seen of her show no mental capacity at all, except for the reptilian reflexes of the brain stem.