Enough: This Girl Is Dead

The Jahi McMath case is a 'disgrace,' Meghan Daum argues
By Kevin Spak,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 16, 2014 1:22 PM CST
Enough: This Girl Is Dead
This undated file photo provided by the McMath family and Omari Sealey shows Jahi McMath.   (AP Photo/Courtesy of McMath Family and Omari Sealey, File)

The media has been sickeningly "balanced" in its handling of the Jahi McMath case, giving supposed experts (generally religious extremists) the platform to foster the delusion that the girl has a chance of waking up. "But this is no longer a story that requires balance," writes Meghan Daum at the LA Times. "The truth is that Jahi has been dead for more than a month now, and the time for subtlety is over. The situation, to put it bluntly, is a disgrace." The public is apparently confused about the difference between brain death, from which a person cannot recover, and a coma, from which recovery is possible because the brain is still functioning to some extent.

Jahi's death is surely tragic, and her family deserves sympathy. But they don't deserve authority over life and death, the attention they've been given, or the donations they've collected "under the pretense that six separate doctors have made a wrong diagnosis and a resurrection will happen." The truth is that people die, even young people, even in horribly random ways, every day. "In a sense, Jahi's family is right: They were mistreated. They were treated as special. And death … is about as unspecial as it gets." Click for Daum's full column. (More Jahi McMath stories.)

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