In the Terri Schiavo case, a brain-damaged woman whose husband wanted to remove her gastric feeding tube, Frist opposed the removal. In a 2005 speech delivered on the Senate Floor, challenged the diagnosis of Schiavo's doctors of Schiavo being in a persistent vegetative state (PVS): "I question it based on a review of the video footage which I spent an hour or so looking at last night in my office."[30] After her death, the autopsy showed signs of long-term and irreversible damage to a brain consistent with PVS.[31] Frist defended his actions after the autopsy.[32]