Friday, March 25, 2005 | 2:56 a.m.
Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.
WEEKEND EDITION
March 26 - 27, 2005
There are no winners in the Terri Schiavo case.
This column is being written following the United States Supreme Court's decision refusing to hear, once again, the legal challenges to the decision to remove Terri's feeding tube so that she can die according to her wishes. A Florida judge ruled thereafter not to let the state's governor, Jeb Bush, take custody away from Terri's husband and re-insert the feeding tube so she can continue to live in whatever state she is in -- a condition well-known to every American at this point because that is all there is on the news.
However these final days of this young woman's life play out, the yearslong struggle to let her die the way she wanted will soon be over and the tragedy, not of her life but of her death, will end.
There are plenty of people for whom all of us can feel empathy. First, there is her husband, the person closest to her, her guardian and the human being responsible for carrying out his wife's wishes about how she wanted to live and die. Years of fighting in and out of the courts and various legislative bodies over how to let his wife die in peace, for which she wished, cannot have been easy.
Next there are her parents, the Schindlers, who, like any parents, have wanted to do anything and everything they could to sustain her, help her and love her through this very long and tragic ordeal.
And third, and most importantly, there is Terri Schiavo. Everyone with a pulse knows her story by now and there can be no human being who doesn't feel deeply about the way her life and death are being played out.
And that, my friends, should be it. But, we all know, that is not it.
Somewhere along the line, the dignity of Terri's life has been hijacked by strangers, people who have absolutely no business involving themselves in this most personal of decisions, and people who seem less concerned about Terri's wishes and more concerned about their own, personal beliefs.
I am not being critical of those personal beliefs. We all have not only the right but also the responsibility to let those feelings be known to loved ones who, of all the rest of the folks on the planet, should and almost always do have our best interests at heart. It is not a perfect plan because sometimes loved ones cannot make the very difficult decisions necessary to end a life or, conversely, to sustain life depending upon the desires of the patient.
But who gave perfect strangers the right to inject themselves in a most difficult situation as the Schiavos and Schindlers have found themselves? It is tragic that husband and parents could not see eye to eye on this decision. And, I suspect, it is rare. At the end of the day, both of them will lose Terri and that is very sad.
But isn't it at least equally sad to see the videos of this poor woman coupled with the knowledge that her final days are being spent as a pawn in some larger scheme to push an agenda that has little to do with Terri?
Strangers? Yes, strangers. How about the entire United States Congress and the President of the United States? I'll bet not more than a handful of those 536 people have ever met Terri, if that. And yet they met late into the night in a most unprecedented manner -- including a trip back to the White House from the ranch by the president -- to pass a law that applied only to Terri so that the court process could begin anew.
What about the tens of thousands of sick and dying Americans who need help from the federal government every day who get nothing but budget cuts? When has Congress ever met in special session to help the rest of America?
We all know by now that it was a politically motivated effort by the Republicans to energize their religious right base -- it worked -- but did anyone consider for a moment Terri's religious right to believe as she wanted and express her desires as she believed?
Of course not. This entire case was about a political agenda by the religious right and their political supporters in Congress to advance their own desire to inject the federal government into yet another of America's most individual freedoms so that their beliefs will become everyone else's regulations.
There are no winners in this matter. But there are losers, and they would be the president, the Congress and every person who inserted themselves into what was a family matter just to pursue a religious dogma that may not have been shared by Terri Schiavo.
It has often been asked why the husband didn't just walk away from Terri and let the parents care for her for the rest of her very sad life. Implicit in that question is a belief that he was acting in his best interests and not hers. Shame on those people who ask such a question. They don't know what Terri wanted and they don't know that she didn't tell her husband exactly what he told the court. Who among us has not confided in our spouses and loved ones what our wishes are for the way we end this life?
All of those people -- many well-meaning I am sure -- who have been lobbying for the government to inject itself into the hospice room of a sick and dying patient must have forgotten their own oaths to love their spouses in sickness and in health, good times and bad. Since none of them know what Terri really told her husband, aren't they doing violence to that sacred marital oath -- often taken in the sight of God -- by assuming they know better how to love, honor and obey Michael Schiavo's wife?
There are no winners here, especially Terri Schiavo, who could be at peace, finally, by the time this is read.
But there are plenty of losers. And those are the people who have used Terri's tragic story to further their goals, not hers.
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