The insane root takes reason prisoner.

The Insane Root Takes Reason Prisoner On a clear, cool January night in 1983, Nancy Cruzan, then twenty-five years old, was driving alone on a Missouri country road when, for reasons unknown, she drove off the road and was hurled from her car. She was found lying face down in a ditch, not breathing and apparently dead. Paramedics arrived, commenced CPR, and spontaneous respiration was restored after about ten minutes. Nancy has never regained consciousness, and is currently maintained by a gastrostomy tube in a permanently unconscious condition at the Mt. Vernon State Hospital. Nancy Cruzan's parents were appointed her guardians in January 1984. There is no material dispute about her medical condition. She is in a persistent vegetative state; she is oblivious to her environment except for reflexive responses to sound and "perhaps" painful stimuli; her cerebral cortical atrophy is irreversible, permanent, progressive and ongoing; she cannot move her body, and will never recover her ability to swallow. With gastrostomy feeding she is expected to live for an additional thirty years or more. Her medical bills are the responsibility of the state of Missouri. Ms. Cruzan's parents asked that the gastrostomy feedings be withdrawn, and sought a court order when the doctors and hospital refused to carry out their request. The trial court's opinion is not a model of clarity. But the judge did grant their petition, finding, among other things, that: Her expressed thoughts at age twenty-five in somewhat serious conversation with a housemate friend that if sick or injured she would not wish to continue her life unless she could live at least halfway normally suggests that given her present condition she would not wish to continue on with her nutrition and hydration. The judge authorized "the co-guardians to exercise (Nancy's) constitutionally guaranteed liberty to request the withholding of nutrition and hydration" and instructed the co-guardians to exercise their legal authority consistent with Nancy's "best interests." The state and the guardian ad litem appealed. The Supreme Court of Missouri Justice Edward D. robertson capsulizes the court's forty-three-page opinion at the end of the first paragraph: "A single issue is presented: May a guardian order that all nutrition and hydration be withheld from an incompetent ward who is in a persistent vegetative state, who is neither dead...nor terminally ill? Because we find that the trial court erroneously declared the law, we reverse."(1) It is difficult to discern just what basis the court has to reach this decision. It almost immediately notes, for example, that this is a "case of first impression" in Missouri, and cites more than fifty cases from sixteen other states that have dealt with similar cases. It concludes that "nearly unanimously, those courts have found a way to allow persons wishing to die, or those who seek the death of a ward, to meet the end sought." This, of course, mistakes the questions posed by these cases--almost none of the patients involved wished to die, and the guardians did not "seek" their deaths. Rather, the right to refuse treatment that was unwanted or intolerable was the core issue. The Cruzan court thus attempts to decide this case, and render prior opinions irrelevant, by presenting a new question. This made the opinion almost impossible to write. Justice Robertson acted like someone asked to write the fiftieth chapter of a novel who begins by declaring that the first forty-nine chapters are irrelevant to his endeavor. Instead of doing a reasoned analysis of these cases and explaining why the principles on which they stand are wrong, the court simply asserts that it has found all of them "wanting." To bolster this conclusion it cites only Macbeth: (We) refuse to eat 'on the insane root which (sic) takes the reason prisoner." This quotation could more aptly be used to demonstrate exactly the opposite point the court seems to want to make. …