Erring on the Side of Life

Paul Schneidereit has a thoughtful column on the Terri (Schindler) Schiavo case in today's Halifax Chronicle Herald. As ink is still being spilt on this, I'll offer my own belated thoughts on the matter.

I am for better or worse intensely political, but politics did not inform my opinion on this issue. Right and wrong seemed so apolitical and axiomatic to me that I naively imagined 90 percent of the population would see Terri's case exactly as I did. In the absence of instructions to the contrary from Terri herself, there simply was no good reason to extinguish the life of this innocent, healthy, and beloved woman.

Terri was not ill, terminally or otherwise, and she was not in pain, chronic or otherwise. She did not require a pacemaker, respirator, or dialysis machine: Her heart, lungs, and liver worked perfectly. She was not in a coma, she was plainly responsive, and most importantly, she was no "vegetable" to those who knew and loved her best.

Terri had of course never properly declared her wishes for such a tragic eventuality; If she had, and had chosen death for herself, those of us who supported life would have respected her wishes and the case would never have become a national and international issue. It is more than a little disconcerting that a court could determine that Terri wished to die based on hearsay testimony from her supposed husband, Michael Schiavo, and his brother and sister, some seven years after Terri was incapacitated.

Schiavo pursued other women and ultimately got engaged and had two children, which is reasonable enough under the circumstances, but that he then continued to claim sole legal guardianship over Terri as her supposed husband, and that the courts continued to recognize him as Terri's husband and sole master, is offensive.

Only months after being awarded $600,000 in Terri's malpractise suit, Schiavo began his mission to deprive Terri of everything that a few willing judges would permit. He refused therapies for Terri, ordered that she not be treated for infection, rejected Terri's parents' pleas to be granted guardianship, refused new testing for Terri including swallowing tests, ordered that she not be taken into the outdoors and fresh air, and much more.

Terri's mother, father, brother, and sister all wanted Terri's life preserved and had offered to assume full responsibility for her. They wanted her to have the benefit of tests, therapies, attention, and love which had been denied by her supposed husband and guardian.

The President and U.S. House and Senate had ordered the federal courts, under Article 3 of the Constitution, to consider Terri's case de novo -- hearing all evidence, rather than restricting inquiry to the ever-diminishing circles of the findings of previous courts -- but the federal courts clearly did no such thing, rejecting a specific, constitutional order of the elected branches of government.

And if the protracted, two-week death of an innocent American by forced dehydration and starvation does not constitute "cruel and unusual punishment", then the term has no meaning. We accord much more humanity to condemned serial killers and rabid dogs.

My sense of humor is not overly genteel, but I found some of the commentary on Terri's case horrifying. Even one blogger and highly-respected columnist I formerly linked to made great sport of mocking Terri's efforts to speak. That's not libertarian, conservative, or leftist; That's cruel.

I suspect -- and indeed hope -- that much of the support for Terri's death was based on false presumptions that she was terminally ill, in incessant pain, in a coma, or living by machine. Surely many who supported Terri's death were projecting much bleaker circumstances -- possibly from the experiences of their own loved ones -- onto Terri, in the absence of fuller information. One Herald letter to the editor which positively rejoiced that Terri had finally died, and went so far as to invoke God as the resolution of the jubilation, stipulated falsely that Terri required life support to breathe. Surely many were assuming that hers was one of those much clearer cases in which death actually can be for the best. And no doubt many could have known little or nothing of the more disturbing elements of Michael Schiavo and Terri's severe deprivation.

That may explain some of the support for Terri's death, but clearly not all of it. Some were driven to want Terri dead by their political hatred of those who took the lead in supporting Terri's life, in exactly the same way that some have come to support Islamic terrorists and fascists out of hatred for the leaders in the struggle against them. Some supported death for Terri because they have come to regard the preservation of such helpless, innocent human life as a step on the "slippery slope" toward social policies they oppose. And then there are some who wanted Terri dead because they are enamored with euthanasia and saw Terri's case as a potentially useful precedent. No doubt some also assumed the case for death must have been sound simply because the courts seemed to sign off on it, but court support for Terri's death resulted from the confluence of judicial refusal to contest lower-court findings of fact, and a lower court presided over by a judge (Greer) who found in Michael Schiavo's favor far too consistently to have possibly been impartial.

As for politics, it would be surprising if this case was very much on the minds of many American voters when they cast ballots again in a year and a half, and then in three and a half years. In that time, many other issues of greater and lesser magnitude will doubtless come and go, and even 24 hours can be a very long time in politics: Just consider the transformation from September 10 to September 11, 2001.

President Bush's lowest-ever approval ratings have coincided with his support for Terri's life, and for the President and Congressional Republicans to take any other position on Terri's case would have been bizarrely out of character, so the accusation that support for Terri's life was motivated by base political considerations is not plausible. It is worth noting, though, that there are at least two other contemporaneous drags on the President's popularity which could explain the polling numbers more than any position on Terri's case: The record-high price of oil and the renewed attention to runaway illegal immigration, the President's policy on which is far and away the single greatest point of opposition among those who otherwise support him.

The one group of American voters for whom Terri's case could conceivably be a "single issue" after a year and a half is the one group who saw something of themselves in Terri: The disabled, and possibly also their guardians. Terri's helplessness and dependence on the aid and compassion of others must certainly have struck a chord with disabled people, and the relentless and in some cases even enthusiastic efforts to have her put out of someone else's misery must surely have been disconcerting for them. The efforts to preserve Terri's life came to be supported by disabled people and organizations, even to the point of an amicus brief filing in Terri's defense by no fewer than ten disabled advocacy groups.

Disabled voters have typically favored Democrats overwhelmingly, but in the past two presidential elections they have been trending Republican. The National Organization on Disability reports that disabled voters split their last four presidential votes thus:

1992: 52 percent Democrat, 29 percent Republican
1996: 69 percent Democrat, 23 percent Republican
2000: 56 percent Democrat, 38 percent Republican
2004: 46 percent Democrat, 52.5 percent Republican

It should be noted that Senate Democrats allowed Terri's bill to pass by unanimous consent, 47 of the 100 House Democrats in attendance voted for the bill, and even a couple prominent leftist Democrats -- namely Jesse Jackson and Sen. Tom Harkin -- actively supported the effort to preserve Terri's life.

A new Zogby poll has been released which runs counter to the spate of polls conducted Zogby's poll asked, "If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water," and some 79 percent of respondents answered that food and water ought not be denied. That is heartening, although notably Zogby's polls are not quite as reliable as they once were. Zogby was arguably the best pollster in America in the late 1990s, but more recently he has been using experimental polling methods (which is commendable but not yet reliable), his polls have fluctuated markedly, and it seems he has become something more of a poll editor than a pollster, amending his poll's results arbitrarily. This particular Zogby poll may in fact be accurate, and I desperately hope it is, but a grain of salt is in order. If accurate, the poll could be confirmation that most people would have erred on the side of life after all, had they only known Terri's true story.

Dennis Miller distilled Terri's sad case as well as anyone, I think, when he asked how we could say no to a mother who pleads, "I gave birth to her. Let me take care of her."