TBT: Notes on the Schiavo Case, 16 Years Later
My Approach to Questions of Life and Death Has Changed
Sometimes, we get things wrong. Sometimes, we change our mind or our sense of the world shifts. Sometimes, we grow. I’m not sure how I which of these describes my thinking about this column from 2005.
What I know today is that I am unabashedly pro-choice, and that I believe the choice is the woman’s and the woman’s alone, that she has rights that an unborn fetus cannot and should not have.
What I know today is that we have the right to choose when to end our own lives, though I also believe that too many act rashly, that too many have foreclosed the potential that the future might bring. Still, it is not my choice.
What I also know is that the decisions on care for those who have lost the ability to decide for themselves and lack a living will — including on whether to pull the plug — should lie with the person closest to them. That would be a spouse or life partner, which is why in the end I think the courts were right in the Terry Schiavo case to allow her husband to make the call.
This column, which ran in April 2005, reflects the ambivalence I think we all should have when considering questions of life and death.
DISPATCHES By Hank Kalet What constitutes the definition of life?
By the time you read this, Terri Schiavo may be dead.
For some, that news will come as a great relief ending years in which she has been kept in some sort of limbo, not quite alive and existing only by virtue of modern technology.
For others, however, her death will be the greatest of tragedies, the product of an uncaring husband and judicial system that consigned a disabled woman to her death against her parents’ wishes.
The general narrative of the story is fairly well known at this point. A then 26-year-old Terri Schiavo collapses from what the papers say was a potassium deficiency. Her heart had stopped and she suffered brain damage before the paramedics arrived. Because she could no longer swallow, a feeding tube was inserted directly into her stomach to deliver the nutrition and hydration she need to stay alive.
Her husband, Michael Schiavo, sued for malpractice and won $1.05 million $750,000 for damages for Ms. Schiavo and $300,000 for loss of companionship for Mr. Schiavo. It was that judgment and how the money would be used that triggered a dispute between Mr. Schiavo and his in-laws, Robert and Mary Schindler, that has only grown worse over time, The New York Times reported recently.
Over the last 10 years or so, there has been a lot of legal wrangling, as Mr. Schiavo has sought to limit his in-laws’ access to his wife and ultimately to follow what he says were his wife’s wishes namely that she not be kept alive "artificially."
More recently, the Florida Legislature and the U.S. Congress have attempted to intervene, without success, and the anti-abortion movement has latched onto the case while liberals hope to use it to demonstrate how far out of the mainstream the national Republican Party has drifted. And there have been death threats against the judge and the Schiavo family and threats of a violent takeover of the Ms. Schiavo’s hospice by supporters of the Schindler family (Ms. Schiavo’s brother, Bobby Schindler, told the protestors that they did not speak for the family).
The case has become the cause celebre of the cable news shows and this heady mix of politics and entertainment has resulted in a gross simplification and distortion of what is a truly complicated issue. The general run of cable news coverage has followed a course similar to the one followed by the folks on CNN’s "Crossfire" on Monday (the show has been nearly "all Schiavo, all the time" lately). On the once side, you had "the liberals" co-host Paul Begala and the Rev. Barry Lynn, executive director of Americans United for Separation of Church and State denouncing Congressional interference and ignoring the family drama at the heart of the debate. On the other, you had "the conservatives" co-host Bay Buchanan and Wendy Wright, senior policy director of Concerned Women For America bleating on about the husband’s heartlessness while they attempted to rewrite the medical record to fit their own agendas. Both sides came off looking like foolish and insensitive louts.
And "Crossfire" offered one of the more balanced approaches on television. Elsewhere, the viewer is subjected to withering attacks, forced outrage and conspiracy theories.
The reality, of course, is far more complicated. At issue here are the definition of life, the determination of when it ends and what constitutes living. These are difficult concepts that the great religions and the greatest of philosophers have been debating for centuries.
What I have found is that I am ambivalent about the Schiavo case. On the one hand, I tend toward what I will call a convoluted pro-life position, tempered by my belief that we all have the ultimate right to control the fate of our own bodies. Basically, I believe that life is sacred, but will not impose my own definitions of life on others. That’s why, while I have grave doubts about the morality of abortion, I must leave it for the woman facing the procedure to make the decision.
I also believe the scientist who defines life as beginning with the viability of the fetus is engaging in the same kind of rationalizing that the pro-life zealot does when he pinpoints the beginning at conception. They both have chosen a point along the continuum and will their arguments accordingly. And neither can prove definitively that their opponent is wrong.
I know this line of reasoning may seem like a cop out or, worse, sophistry. But the issue forces into collision two tenets that I hold dear a deep respect for life and a belief that it is not the government’s role to impose rigid moral codes on individual consciences.
The same quandary exists here. The questions at the center of this case are the basic ones I outlined above, plus one other who gets to answer them. What complicates this is that the only person with the obvious right to decide Terri Schiavo’s fate Terri Schiavo herself is not in a position to make the decision herself and those closest her husband and her parents cannot come to an agreement.
That’s why the state courts stepped in, ultimately ruling that the decision on the feeding tube is Michael Schiavo’s to make.
What is troubling, ultimately, is that the process that played out did not seem to have Ms. Schiavo’s best interests at heart. She did not have an independent advocate safeguarding her rights and, as the case garnered more and more media attention, she was transformed into nothing more than a political symbol.
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