It was impossible to look without grief at the images of Terri Schiavo starving slowly to death in a Florida hospice. It has, alas, become impossible in America to look at such a tragic set of circumstances without hysteria.
Those of us who have long worried that unleashing religious fundamentalism into the bloodstream of American politics would lead to disaster can feel only that our fears have now come true.
Fifteen years ago Schiavo suffered a heart stoppage that was caused by her bulimia. Her brain was temporarily starved of oxygen and scans showed that her cerebral cortex had stopped functioning.
A scan shows that her brain has since shrunk massively. Her electroencephalogram reading was and is flat — she has no brain waves. She is not brain dead, but she has no ability to think, feel or communicate.
She can breathe on her own and random eye movements can give the impression of some kind of awareness. She has been kept alive by a feeding tube.
In the first years that she was in this horrifying state, her husband Michael did all he could to find treatment, going from hospital to hospital trying new therapies. Terri was sent to California to have experimental platinum electrodes implanted to get her brain going again. Michael slept next to her for five weeks. At the time he and Terri’s parents were united in doing all they could for what was left of his wife.
Eventually the husband acquiesced to near-universal medical opinion and came to terms with the fact that his wife would never revive. He said that when she was cognisant she had once told him that she did not want to be kept alive artificially for an indefinite period of time.
You can see why. The Miami Herald reported: “She suffered from bile stones and kidney stones, according to court papers, and had to have her gallbladder removed. She has ‘drop foot’, where her foot twists downward, and the ensuing pressure resulted in the amputation of her left little toe. She frequently developed urinary tract infections, diarrhoea and vaginitis. Several cysts were removed from her neck. Several times her feeding tube got infected.”
The sight of a human being in a state of disintegration became too much for Michael Schiavo to bear. He decided to let her die with dignity.
Her parents, for understandable reasons, differed and fought him in the Florida courts for many painful years. The parents, who had at first encouraged Michael to date other women, then used his second relationship (he subsequently dated another woman and had two children with her) as a weapon against him.
However, court after court acknowledged the overwhelming medical data and the fact that Terri’s legal guardian was her husband. Court case after court case moved Terri inexorably towards death.
Then members of the political religious right heard of what was going on, took up the case and cast it as an example of what the Pope has called the “culture of death”. They used Nazi analogies. They demonised Michael Schiavo. They saw an opportunity to highlight their principled defence of human life.
Their clout was such that they got the Florida legislature to pass a bill to protect Terri, a law subsequently overruled by the courts in Florida. Last weekend they got Congress in an emergency Sunday session to pass a law to delay the process of death, pending new federal court challenges. President George W Bush rushed back to Washington to sign the bill in the middle of the night. You want proof that the religious right runs the Republican party? Federal courts then examined the long course of the case and came to the conclusion that Florida’s courts had acted within the law. There was no legal case to intervene. The parents appealed to the US Supreme Court, which again refused to hear the case.
I don’t know what I would do in such a case. The nearest I have come was watching one of my best friends die of Aids while his family and friends refused to resuscitate him. It was what he wanted. I stood by, helpless. But I recognised that this kind of decision can be made only by the person herself or by the family or spouse or legally appointed guardian.
The idea that government should have the final say, that the government could be swayed by political lobbies, strikes me as grossly inappropriate. If limited government means anything it means leaving decisions like this as close to the individual as possible.
If the American principle of federalism means anything it means that the local state’s courts are the only relevant instruments to deal with such a tragedy. But that is not what American Republicanism now thinks. It has a religious drive that puts theological certitude before prudential or legal reasoning and a growing contempt for an independent judiciary.
That is how Bill Bennett, a leading conservative activist, could write last Thursday in the conservative National Review, that Jeb Bush, the Florida governor, should simply overrule the courts, break the law and send armed guards to insert the feeding tube by force. This attack on the basis of constitutional liberty in the name of religion is usually called theocracy. Polling shows that large majorities do not think the federal government should get involved.
Bush himself, who said last week that “it is wise to always err on the side of life”, did not seem so concerned when he signed countless death warrants as governor of Texas, with the most cursory of legal reviews. He also signed a Texas law that gave next of kin discretion to remove life support from a terminally ill patient in the absence of a living will.
Last week an eight-year-old boy died in Texas after his tube was removed because his parents could not afford treatment, but the religious right seemed uninterested. Culture of life? The Republicans are engaged in a fascinating debate about what they believe. The survival of what is left of Terri Schiavo is for some people a genuine matter of moral principle. That position should be respected. But it should also be subject to the rule of law.
For others, the Schiavo case is a first battle to win over the religious right primary voters who will determine the next Republican nominee. The Republican leadership is gambling that the intensity of their religious base will outweigh the more general public’s disdain for this exercise in government over-reach. The broader public, they calculate, will forget. The zealots will always remember.
If Schiavo dies they will have a martyr as well. They will use her death as a symbol in the campaigns to come.
