So did slave owners.

De-personalize a certain class of human beings, and you can use, abuse or eliminate them however you choose.

That’s exactly what’s happening in the new civil rights movement that covers the pre-born to the not-yet-dead. One of the strategies is to change the language, including “diagnoses” like “persistent vegetative state”. No one wants to think of a human being as a vegetable.

Good. Don’t. Because no one is. Tell that to Jane Brody.

New York Times health columnist Jane Brody is coming under fire for referring to Terri Schiavo as a vegetable in a recent interview. The comment has one bioethicist upset — saying the term neither confers the dignity and humanity patients deserve nor is medically accurate.

Speaking to the need for elderly people and terminally ill patients to begin planning for death, Brody told the Times that it is never to early to begin considering end-of-life plans.

“You don’t have to be old. If you recall, Terri Schiavo was 26 when she suffered a heart attack that deprived her brain of oxygen and left her a living vegetable for 15 years, at great cost and trauma to her family,” she said.

But Wesley J. Smith, a noted author and attorney, considers the comments a catachresis and that the term “vegetable” is an offense similar to racial slurs.

“Terri Schiavo was not a carrot or a turnip,” he responds. “She was a human being with a profound cognitive disability. Calling her a “V” demeans her and dehumanizes her moral worth as a human being–just as the odious “N-word” does people with dark skin.”

“It should never be used among enlightened people. Indeed, we need to grow as a culture so that anyone using it is treated with the same disdain by polite society as we do now to anyone who uses the crude ‘N’ epithet,” he explains.

Right. This is the only way to change the culture. Apply reason and logic without appealing to emotional arguments, hard as that can be.

I work with Terri Schiavo’s family, and I’m always amazed at how composed they remain while tortured inside when they hear these ongoing assaults on Terri, as well as all cognitively impaired human beings. They just keep on working to help inform and engage the culture on the health care issues we all face, in a heartbeat.