Question

Overview: Healthcare professionals provide support throughout the cycle of life, from birth to death. They have an obligation to provide humane and compassionate care to patients while adhering to their specific field’s code of ethics. Sometimes, healthcare professionals a re privy to discussions between family members regarding end-of-life issues. In some instances, a healthcare facility may be in charge of providing information about advance directives to patients. Healthcare professionals should calibrate their own moral beliefs to align with their ethical and legal obligations . By studying issues contained within real-life cases, healthcare professionals can come to terms with their beliefs and obligations relative to end-of-life issues.

Prompt: In this project, you will analyze the Terri Schiavo case through the lens of the bioethical issue(s) related to the case. You will address what the bioethical issue is and what role end-of-life issues, such as self-determination and advanced directives, played in the case. Using your analysis, you will determine how this bioethical issue impacted the decisions made by the healthcare professionals involved in the case. Specifically, your essay must address the following critical elements:

I. Introduction : Describe the provided case, including information on the stakeholders involved, the bioethical issue, and the time period of the incident that occurred.

II. Bioethical Analysis: Analyze the bioethical issue for the role end-of-life issues played in the case. Be sure to use appropriate terminology and support with secondary research.

III. Conclusion: Describe how the bioethical issue influenced the decisions of healthcare professionals involved in the case. Be sure to use specific examples.

Answer 1

Though tragic, the case of Florida’s Terri Schiavo offers an unprecedented analysis. The patient's unique circumstances provide one with a valuable and concrete illustration of political theory and the formation of public policy. Despite national media attention and the infamous case’s lengthy court proceedings, the Terri Schiavo saga failed to make any legitimate national policy changes. The public policy’s Process Model, despite the case of Terri Schiavo and subsequent national concern, contributed to the stagnation of euthanasia legislation on a federal, state, and local level.In the context of this case study, the American public (i.e. voters), euthanasia interest groups (The Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network, The American Medical Association), and legislators are stakeholders.Medical ethics, at least as practiced at the bedside in the form of clinical ethics, properly starts with medical science and then moves on to human behavior, spirituality, health law, and finally moral argumentation. . Much of the ethical debate in the Schiavo case has focused on ANH for patients in the vegetative state. Although many moral traditions have contributed to that debate, it is particularly helpful to consider the Catholic tradition. In the field of clinical ethics, we often appeal to concepts such as benefit and burden analysis, proportionality, or double effect, concepts commonly associated with the Catholic moral tradition. In addition, Terri Schiavo, Karen Quinlan, and Nancy Cruzan were all Catholic. The Catholic tradition offers two competing viewpoints on the morality of withholding or withdrawing ANH.The Terri Schiavo case was a right-to-die legal case in the United States from 1998 to 2005, involving Theresa Marie Schiavo , a woman in an irreversible persistent vegetative state.

Yet another reoccurring topic of interest that emerged or the course of the research process was the concept of ethics in the Terri Schiavo case. An obvious point of discord over the course of the hearings was whether it was ethically right to remove Schiavo’s nourishment when she had no living will. Most of them agree that this was an ethical choice and was the right thing to do, morally speaking. The University of Washington’s Tom Preston (2006) argues “the use of a feeding tube inserted directly in to the stomach constituted artificial treatment” and that Schiavo’s “treatment prolonged biological life but (would not have) lead to a cure or restore her  health.” Others agreed that removing Schiavo’s nutrition was ethically sound, arguing that thought the probability of a patient in a persistent vegetative state for three moths was 1%, the probability of a patient in a persistent vegetative state for 6 months or more was 0%. Terri Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state for over 15 years (Joshua, Chirchill, and Kirshner, 2005).Many religious scholars, however, argue that because of Schiavo’s roots as a devout Catholic, she would not have supported any euthanasia-centered practices and the decision to remove her only source of nutrition was not only unethical, but also inherently wrong. Nevertheless, most scholars agree that she would rather have died peacefully than for her parents to assume the “financial and emotional burden of her care” (Gellman, 2005). Regardless of one’s moral reasoning, all scholars can agree on one thing: ethics, no doubt, play the foremost role in public’s formation of an opinion on right-to-die legislation.

As for the health professionals they took many steps to respect the patient's religious beliefs as a catholic.At the end of all of the medical, legal, and ethical argument, it is most important to remember that no matter how certain any of us may be of our analysis, decisions near the end of life should never be easy and clear. We must remind ourselves that true wisdom comes with the acknowledgment of uncertainty and admitting that we cannot know all there is to know.There's sometimes hope in uncertainity. This uncertainty is neither an excuse to engage in endless moral relativism or to engage in intellectual nihilism, refusing to search for the best possible solution or the least terrible outcome for a troubling moral problem. As individuals and as a society, we must do a better job of following the wisdom of the sage Martin Buber, who teaches us that we show the greatest respect for our patients, loved ones, and all humanity by treating each person as our moral equal.