{"id":1633,"date":"2005-06-16T12:10:21","date_gmt":"2005-06-16T19:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/06\/16\/terri-schiavo-autopsy\/"},"modified":"2005-06-16T12:10:21","modified_gmt":"2005-06-16T19:10:21","slug":"terri-schiavo-autopsy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1633","title":{"rendered":"Terri Schiavo autopsy"},"content":{"rendered":"

By now, most “Alas” readers know that Terri Schiavo’s autopsy has been released; you can read it here (pdf link<\/a>). For an excellent summary of the report’s findings, I recommend this post at Abstract Appeal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The most interesting finding, to me, is the finding that Schiavo was blind. How many tens of thousands of people saw the video of Schiavo appearing to follow a balloon with her eyes, and concluded that she must be conscious? How many times did “pro-“Schaivo folks who had viewed the video say, in response to an argument or a piece of evidence contradicting their opinion, “I know what I saw, and that woman is conscious”?<\/p>\n

To some extent these people were fooled by tricky editing. But they were also fooled by the human tendency to anthromorphize – to assume that if something has a face, then we can read thoughts behind that face. That there are thoughts behind the face to read. That everything with a face is, in ways that matter, just like us. (You see this in the abortion debate a lot, as increasingly sophisticated ultrasound images of fetuses are seen by pro-lifers as proof positive, while pro-choicers like me find them beautiful and wonderful for eager expecting parents, but irrelevant to the freedom vs. forced childbirth debate.)<\/p>\n

Sometimes – just sometimes – it makes more sense to trust in science than to trust in what our eyes tell us.<\/p>\n

The finding that Schiavo was blind also raises the possibility that she was misdiagnosed with PVS; at least one study has found that people who are visually impaired are the most likely to be misdiagnosed with PVS. However, the extreme damage to her brain (confirmed by the autopsy), combined with all the other evidence from before Schiavo’s body died, makes it overwhelmingly clear that Schiavo was, in fact, incapable of any cognition at all. 50% of her brain was simply gone, and what remained was in bad shape. So despite the blindness, I’m as confident as I can be that the PVS diagnosis was correct.<\/p>\n

There is no autopsy evidence of trauma associated with abuse. In fact, the autopsy report seems more certain of this finding than any other. This doesn’t absolutely <\/em>prove that she wasn’t abused – nothing can prove a negative – but it’s notable since the main evidence cited by the Terri-was-abused camp up to this point has been claims that her bones were damaged, and that claim has now definitively been proved an error.<\/p>\n

There is no autopsy evidence that Schiavo suffered from bulimia, although as The J Train<\/a> points out, it’s not clear that bulimia fifteen years in the past would leave any evidence for an autopsy to discover.<\/p>\n

There’s more – as I said, see Matt’s post at Abstract Appeal<\/a> for a fuller summary.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By now, most “Alas” readers know that Terri Schiavo’s autopsy has been released; you can read it here (pdf link). For an excellent summary of the report’s findings, I recommend this post at Abstract Appeal. The most interesting finding, to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terri-schiavo"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}