Is starvation and dehydration "painless"?
Wesley J. Smith has a point by point smackdown of the rationalizations made for starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo (and those like her).
Some compare withdrawing a feeding tube from a disabled person to not forcing food on a cancer patient who has stopped eating. These are two completely different situations -- they are not equivalent at all:
Yes, it is true that when people are actively dying from terminal disease, they often refuse food and water. The disease makes the food and water repulsive to them. In such circumstances, it is medically inappropriate to force food and water into a person who is actively rejecting it. Indeed, doing so could cause suffering.But this isn't what is happening to Terri. She isn't dying of cancer. Her body isn't shutting down as part of the natural dying process. Indeed, she is not dying at all--unless her food and water is taken away.
So, what exactly happens to someone who is starving and dehydrating to death?
When I conducted research on this question in preparation for writing my book "Forced Exit," I asked St. Louis neurologist William Burke these very questions. Here is what he told me:"A conscious [cognitively disabled] person would feel it just as you or I would. They will go into seizures. Their skin cracks, their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucus membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue because of the drying out of the stomach lining. They feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. Imagine going one day without a glass of water! Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death."
But you may be thinking, "That's just what one neurologist says." Okay, how about the testimony of someone who was in a state very similar to Terri's:
At age 33, Kate Adamson collapsed from a devastating and incapacitating stroke. She was utterly unresponsive and was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS). At the urging of doctors, who believed she would never get better, her nourishment was stopped. But midway through the dehydration process, she began to show subtle signs of comprehension, so her food and water were restored.
So, did Kate Adamson feel pain?
When the feeding tube was turned off for eight days, I thought I was going insane. I was screaming out in my mind, "Don't you know I need to eat?" And even up until that point, I had been having a bagful of Ensure as my nourishment that was going through the feeding tube. At that point, it sounded pretty good. I just wanted something. The fact that I had nothing, the hunger pains overrode every thought I had. [...]I craved anything to drink. Anything. I obsessively visualized drinking from a huge bottle of orange Gatorade. And I hate orange Gatorade. I did receive lemon flavored mouth swabs to alleviate dryness but they did nothing to slack my desperate thirst.
But what about painkillers? Won't that stop the suffering?
At this point, defenders of removing feeding tubes from people with profound cognitive disabilities might claim that whatever painful sensations dehydration may cause, these patients receive palliating drugs to ensure that their deaths are peaceful. But note: Adamson either did not receive such medications, or if she did, they didn't work. Moreover, because these disabled people usually can't communicate, it is impossible to know precisely what they experience.
I tried to hit on the major points of this piece, but you really should read the whole thing.
Link via Mark Shea, who has been driving home the point lately that we are not the perfect, civilized society that we think ourselves as being. This is a point that some don't want to hear, and I won't deny that it's hard to listen to. But we need to listen.