Here's an NRO editorial that makes the essential point relevant to the autopsy report: so what? The point is you don't kill people for being handicapped, and proving that she was handicapped alters that point not one iota.
Nevertheless, has anyone seen a "post-mortem" on the post-mortem? It seems to me that many of the things blithely asserted by the coroner were pretty big assumptions on his part. Some blogger somewhere must by now have done some digging into the questions I have. Send me the link if you've seen it, please.
Remember 10-15 years ago when a study suggested the existence of a "gay gene"? The author of the study himself said it proved no such thing. For starters, his sample was too small to extrapolate to general population. But secondly, as I recall it, all he showed was that some portion of the hypothalamus of gay corpses was enlarged in comparison with heterosexuals. To call that proof of a gay gene is a stretch because it assumes something is a cause which could well be an effect. So all the study did was suggest an interesting field for more research.
That's what the coroner's report in the Schiavo case makes me think of. How does he know that some of the things he found didn't happen as a result of severe dehydration? And remember this post? In the story linked there, the patient in question shouldn't have been able to respond --but he did. And then we had a spate of stories about people suddenly waking or speaking after years in brain-damaged states. It therefore strikes me as beyond the bounds of science to say anything more than that Terri Schiavo's brain was half the size of a healthy one. Beyond that, I think there is much that medicine just can't tell us about what people can or can't do after brain damage. Of course I am no expert, which is why I seek a medical breakdown of the coroner's report, but I sniff an agenda in the report's tone.
