Schiavo Autopsy Results

Remember the Terry Schiavo story from March? She was the Florida woman who had been in a vegetative state since 1991. When the courts finally gave her husband the okay to pull her feeding tube, Schiavo's impending death became a circus that rivaled anything ever produced by Barnum & Bailey's. Religious zealots descended on the hospice where she lay, and Republican politicians flushed their "less government" principles down the toilet as they tripped over one another pandering to the Christian right. Congress passed legislation seeking to postpone the inevitable, and Bush hopped on Air Force One to fly to DC to sign the bill. And once the tube was actually pulled, protestors kept getting themselves arrested as they tried to enter the building with glasses of water. At one point, dancing bears may have been involved, but I'm not sure.

Following her death, the Pinellas-Pasco medical examiner conducted an autopsy, and the results were released earlier today. Not surprisingly, it shows that she had "massive and irreversible brain damage." That damage included the vision centers of her brain, thus rendering her completely blind. Overall, her brain was about half the size of a normal one. The report also says that the "damage was irreversible, and no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons."

Curiously, Senate Majority Leader (and a licensed cardiologist) Bill Frist failed to determine all this when he conducted an in-depth examination of a two minute videotape of Miss Schiavo, and declared that the 50 doctors who had previously examined her in person were all wrong. On the other hand, he scored valuable points with the evangelicals that now control the GOP, and that's all that matters when you're an opportunistic little weasel.