- I have covered highly visible, dramatic "right to
die" cases - including those of Karen Ann Quinlan and Nancy Cruzan
- for more than 25 years. Each time, most of the media, mirroring one another,
have been shoddy and inaccurate.
-
- The reporting on the fierce battle for the life of 39-year-old
Terri Schiavo has been the worst case of this kind of journalistic malpractice
I've seen.
-
- On October 15, Terri's husband and legal guardian, Michael
Schiavo, ordered the removal of her feeding tube. As she was dying, the
Florida legislature and Governor Jeb Bush overruled her husband on October
21, and the gastric feeding tube has been reinserted pending further recourse
to the court.
-
- So intent is Michael Schiavo on having his wife die of
starvation that one of his lawyers, after the governor's order to reconnect
the feeding tube, faxed doctors in the county where the life-saving procedure
was about to take place, threatening to sue any physician who reinserted
a feeding tube. The husband had immediately gone to court to get a judge
to revoke what the legislature and the governor had done.
-
- The husband claims that he is honoring his marriage vows
by carrying out the wishes of his wife that she not be kept alive by "artificial
means." As I shall show, this hearsay "evidence" by the
husband has been contradicted. The purportedly devoted husband, moreover,
has been living with another woman since 1995. They have a child, with
another on the way. Was that part of his marital vows?
-
- For 13 years, Terri Schiavo has not been able to speak
for herself. But she is not brain-dead, not in a comatose state, not terminal,
and not connected to a respirator. If the feeding tube is removed, she
will starve to death. Whatever she may or may not have said, did she consider
food and water "artificial means?"
-
- The media continually report that Terri is in a persistent
vegetative state, and a number of neurologists and bioethicists have more
than implied to the press that "persistent" is actually synonymous
with "permanent." This is not true, as I shall factually demonstrate
in upcoming columns. I will also provide statements from neurologists who
say that if Terri were given the proper therapyódenied to her by
her husband and guardian after he decided therapy was becoming too expensive
despite $750,000 from a malpractice suitóshe could learn to eat
by herself and become more responsive.
-
- Terri is responsive, beyond mere reflexes. Having this
degree of sentience, if she is starved to death, she will not "die
in peace" as The New York Times predicts in an uninformed October
23 editorial supporting the husband. What happens to someone who can feel
pain during the process of starvation is ghastly.
-
- Increasingly, New York Times editorials are not as indicative
of conscious liberal "bias" as they are of ignorance or denial
of the facts, as I have demonstrated in my series on Judge Charles Pickering.
-
- In all the stories on Terri Schiavo and her parents'
determined efforts to save her life, the media continually report that
the Florida legislature intervened because of many thousands of calls,
letters, and e-mails from the Christian Right and pro-lifers. Those groups
and individuals are indeed a major factor in rousing support to prevent
Terri from being starved to death. But among the many others who sent urgent
messages are disabled Americans and their organizations.
-
- Except for the op-ed page article by Stephen Drake of
the Not Dead Yet organization in the October 29 Los Angeles Times ("Disabled
Are Fearful: Who Will Be Next?") and a letter in the October 24 New
York Times, I have seen hardly any mention in the press of the deeply concerned
voices of the disabled, many of whom, in their own lives, have survived
being terminated by bioethicists and other physicians who strongly believe
that certain lives are not worth living. The numbers of these "new
priesthoods of death," as I call them, are increasing.
-
- The letter to The New York Times signed by Max Lapertosa,
staff counsel, Access Living in Chicagoótold of "14 national
disability organizations that filed a friend-of-the-court brief to support
keeping Terri Schiavo alive." Lapertosa objected to a Times editorial
calling for Terri to go gently into that good night because, said the moral
philosophers of the Times, "true respect for life includes recognizing
. . . when it ceases to be meaningful."
-
- Max Lapertosa reminded Gail Collins's board of oracles
at the Time's editorial page that "many would lump into this category
[of meaningless lives] people with severe autism, multiple sclerosis or
cerebral palsy who, like Mrs. Schiavo, are nonverbal and are often described
as being "in their own world."
-
- "The judicial sanctioning of such attitudes,"
Lapertosa continued, "moves America back to the days when the sterilization
and elimination of people with disabilities did not merely reflect private
prejudices but were embraced as the law of the land."
-
- In the Los Angeles Times' October 29 op-ed piece by Stephen
Drake, he writes: "I was born brain-damaged as a result of a forceps
delivery. The doctor told my parents I would be a 'vegetable' for the rest
of my lifeóthe same word now being used for Schiavoóand that
the best thing would be for nature to take its course. They refused. Although
I had a lot of health problems, surgeries and pain as a child, I went on
to lead a happy life." And clearly, his is a very articulate life.
I have interviewed other such "vegetables."
-
- Ignoring the facts of the case, the American Civil Liberties
Unionóto my disgust, but not my surprise in view of the long-term
distrust of the ACLU by disability rights activistsóhas marched
to support the husband despite his grave conflicts of interests in this
life-or-death case. The ACLU claims the governor and the legislature of
Florida unconstitutionally overruled the courts, which continued to declare
the husband the lawful guardian. On the other hand, the ACLU cheered when
Governor George Ryan of Illinois substituted his judgment for that of the
courts by removing many prisoners from death row. In a later column, I'll
go deeper into the constitutional debate over saving Terri's life.
-
- In the October 28 weeklystandard.com, Wesley Smith, author
of Forced Exitówho has accurately researched more of these cases
than anyone I knowóreports that of the $750,000 to be held in trust
for Terri's rehabilitation, two of Michael Schiavo's lawyers pressing for
removal of her feeding tube have been paid more than $440,000. Whom did
that rehabilitate? Any comment from the ACLU? If the husband and the lawyers
succeed, maybe the ACLU will send flowers to Terri's funeral.
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