Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Group 4 Cases 47-48

Yesterday in class we were assigned  the cases of "Body Snatchers" and "Terri Schiavo." Of course when talking about body snatchers, we all seemed to be in agreement that this was unethical as the body snatchers are unauthorized to take these body parts/tissues. (The only question I personally had was how do people just show up to tissue banks with someone else's bones?? And initially get away with it?) The conversation spiraled into cases in which there is consent to take the body, and we began to discuss when a person is no longer a person anymore, but just a body.  We all came to the conclusion that this definition may vary depending on someone's personal beliefs. We talked about how it was different when the body is someone you knew and had a connection to rather than one that is unidentified. We talked about body donation, and how over time different generations have different opinions of what should be done to a body when a person dies, such as when there used to be wakes and now there are funeral homes, and maybe one day there will be something else. As you can see, our topics varied quite a bit, so we didn't discuss much about the Terri Schiavo case.

[Amber]

2 comments:

  1. Amber summed everything up rather well, I think the main thing we kept coming back to was the personhood thing, and how much that effects our view on who gets to decide what is allowed and not allowed when it comes to the dead. We pretty much agreed that you couldn't defile a body in any way if they didn't specify that you were allowed to use it. Even though we seemed to agree that the actual body was NOT the person, noone seemed okay with it just becoming public property, even though logically we shouldn't be bothered by it.

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  2. I kept getting stuck on what Betsy said ^^.... Why do we have such a hard time letting go of the bodies? What good does it do us to have it rotting in the ground instead of being used for medical purposes? It just seems like, as alive people, we have a hard time separating "us" and "our bodies".... its our desire to keep living that obscures the reality of a body without life!

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