Sometimes it's easy to get confused in the shitstorm of spin and lazy reporting surrounding the nightmarish Terri Schiavo story. The fact of the matter is that she will never, ever recover, a medical fact not disputed by anybody but her parents, the charlatans who've surrounded them and the lawmakers using a brain-dead woman as a political football.
Though the spin and the reporting can create doubt about whether Terri Schiavo is going to return to something approaching normal cognitive function, it can be wiped away by one look at a CT scan of her brain, found here. Per the University of Miami, which provided the link, the large dark regions in the CT scan show "extensive cortical regions filled with spinal fluid." In other words, the regions of her brain containing her memories, emotions and other higher-brain functions have disappeared in the past 15 years and have been replaced with spinal fluid.
She will not recover. Should it be time for her parents to let her go? Like most of the country, I don't believe it's Congress's job to tell them that. In order to avoid being hypocritcal, I'm not going to tell them that, either. But a series of courts have been given that right, and they've told the Schiavos to let go, over and over and over again, based partly on the simple fact that Terri Schiavo will not recover.
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