Terri Schiavo: Unsettling the Settled
![handle is hein.journals/luclj37 and id is 307 raw text is: Terri Schiavo: Unsettling The Settled
Lois Shepherd*
I. INTRODUCTION
In the early months of 2005, Terri Schiavo's story captured the
national public spotlight in ways reminiscent of Karen Ann Quinlan in
the 1970s and Nancy Beth Cruzan in the 1980s. All were young women
whose lives were tragically altered by traumatic events that left them in
what we now call a permanent vegetative state.' Their fates were
* D'Alemberte Professor of Law, Florida State University College of Law. I wish to thank the
Loyola Law Journal for inviting me to the symposium where I presented this paper. The
presentations of the other commentators and the questions and comments of the audience were
very insightful and helpful. I also wish to thank Norman Cantor, Barbara Noah, Kathy
Cerminara, Mary Crossley, and Mark Hall for discussing several of the issues presented in this
paper in ways that were especially helpful to me. Thanks also must go to Barbara Chrisman and
Megan Morley for their excellent research assistance.
1. In 1972, two doctors adopted the term persistent vegetative state to describe patients who
had entered a continuing state of unconsciousness marked by periods of wakefulness. Bryan
Jennett & Fred Plum, Persistent Vegetative State After Brain Damage: A Syndrome in Search of a
Name, LANCET, Apr. 1972, at 734-37. Since then, those both inside and outside the medical
community have adopted the term, but it has come to denote a permanent rather than merely a
continuing or persistent condition. BRYAN JENNETr, THE VEGETATIVE STATE: MEDICAL FACTS,
ETHICAL AND LEGAL DILEMMAS 4-5 (2002). The term permanent vegetative state more
accurately describes the condition and may be gaining ground, although a number of statutes that
refer to the vegetative state in its permanent condition still use the term persistent vegetative
state. See, e.g., FLA. STAT. § 765.101(12) (2004) (defining persistent vegetative state as a
permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is: (a) The absence of
voluntary action or cognitive behavior of any kind. (b) An inability to communicate or interact
purposefully with the environment.). In this paper, I use the term permanent vegetative state
to refer to the condition at issue, which is the variant of vegetativeness that is considered
irreversible. It should be noted that a number of commentators have protested the use of the term
vegetative as demeaning because of its suggestion that the patient is something less than a
person, a mere vegetable. See, e.g., Raphael Cohen-Almagor, Some Observations on Post-
Coma Unawareness Patients and on Other Forms of Unconscious Patients: Policy Proposals, 16
MED. & L. 451, 461 (1997) ([T]he term 'vegetative' dehumanizes the patients, suggesting that
we speak of some form of sub-human life.); Adam J. Hildebrand, Masked Intentions: The
Masquerade of Killing Thoughts Used to Justify Dehydrating and Starving People in a
Persistent Vegetative State and People with Other Profound Neurological Impairments, 16
ISSUES L. & MED. 143, 149 (2000) (arguing that the term is an insult to the inherent dignity of
the human person). While I am sympathetic to this argument, the terminology has become so
widespread that using a different term may cause confusion, because no alternative has yet
achieved significant use.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/luclj37&div=16&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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Terri Schiavo: Unsettling the Settled
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