The Schiavo case

I have the utmost compassion for Terri Schiavo and her husband Michael, and for her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler. Their family tragedy is one that is enacted many times across the country when a person has no living will and family members get caught up in a dispute over when it is appropriate to terminate life.

A recent report in the Washington Post estimates that about one-third of all Americans are without a living will. Families often get torn apart by these life and death decisions.

But in the Schiavo case, a personal tragedy has been turned into a political sideshow by a Republican Congress and a group of right-to-lifers whose propensity for interfering in others’ lives knows no boundary. For these people, one can only have the utmost contempt.

If I were a parent of Terri Schiavo, perhaps I too would have trouble letting go. And if I were Michael Schiavo and my wife had expressed the desire not to be kept alive if the unthinkable happened, I too would probably feel obligated to finally grant her wish.

What I would not want, if I were Terri Schiavo, is to have the agony of such a personal decision spread across the nation’s newspapers. I would not want grandstanding politicians trying to benefit from my tragedy or placard-waving protestors reducing my dilemma to a bunch of cheap slogans.

The specter of the Senate Majority Leader second-guessing 15 years of medical opinion after watching a videotape is really as extraordinary as it is morally reprehensible. It’s time we started treating Sen. William Frist less like a doctor and more like the political hack he is.

Frist lost all respect from the medical community a while back when he publicly tried to avoid offending his constituents by telling them what any good doctor knows: that you can’t get AIDS through the sweat or tears of the afflicted. Now, after viewing a videotape, he declares that Terri Schiavo can get better because she can open and close her eyes and even make facial expressions.

Let me quote from an accepted medical definition of the vegetative state: "People in a persistent vegetative state have suffered severe brain damage that has destroyed higher brain functions, leaving them with no conscious awareness of their surroundings. Because the more primitive parts of the brain, such as the brain stem, continue to function, they maintain many bodily functions, such as the ability to breathe and to cycle between sleep and wakefulness. Their eyes open and close and they can have reactions to noise and movement – including facial expressions such as grimaces, crying or even laughter – that make it appear as if they have some consciousness."

The movements of the eyes and the facial expressions all give false hope, and the responsible members of the medical community understand that. Parents who can’t face the reality of their daughter’s death can be forgiven. But the political opportunists and the religious zealots in America are always ready to score points at the expense of someone else’s misery.

There’s the ethically bankrupt Tom DeLay who calls the removal of a feeding tube from Terri Schiavo "barbarism and an act of medical terrorism." He says "murder is being committed against a defenseless citizen in Florida." The protestors, who have appointed themselves the guardians of morality in America, carry signs that read "Judicial murder" and "Stop feeding Michael," a reference to Terri’s husband.

To echo a phrase from the Army-McCarthy hearings, have they no decency? And if they have no sense of decency, shouldn’t we at least expect the true conservatives in Congress to stand up against more federal intrusion into the most intimate personal matters surrounding our lives? Whatever happened to precious state rights? Before Congress recently adjourned, these same keepers of the flame of federalism were ready to run roughshod over the Florida courts to force the reinsertion of a feeding tube into Terri Schiavo.

These right-to-lifers: Do they want to define life so far down that no sensible person would want to live it that way? Is it life they are protecting when a person lives off a feeding tube for 15 years without hope of getting better? Surely they throw the term "murder" around too loosely. Surely their definition of "life" is too macabre for most of us to tolerate?

We have stood by while these narrow-minded busybodies remove science from our classrooms and replace it with myth. We have stood by while, in the name of protecting a cell that is not life and is never going to be life, they obstruct our chance to help our parents and brothers and sisters and friends who suffer with everything from juvenile diabetes to Parkinson’s Disease. We have stood by while they harass women going into health clinics at the most painful moments of their lives.

And now here they come again, turning the dignity of death into a carnival in order to force their beliefs down our throats.

It is not life they promote but their own moral arrogance.