Crusade is blind to hard facts of medicine (Terri Schiavo column)

The fact of Terri Schiavo's life, the possibility of her death, is a regular subject in the ethics classes Dr. Robert Walker conducts at the University of South Florida medical school.

Dr. Walker, an associate professor and head of the school's division of medical ethics and humanities, made another presentation last Thursday, one day after Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge George Greer handed Schiavo's parents another defeat and set still another date for the removal of her feeding tube.

What Walker said will not satisfy those who consider Schiavo's case and see the word euthanasia written all over it. It will infuriate those who have so wrapped themselves in this cause that St. Petersburg's Catholic bishop, Robert Lynch, last month counseled against calling the judges who have consistently ruled against keeping Schiavo alive "murderers."

Walker left no doubt in an interview where he stands. He's with the judges who have concluded Schiavo would not have wanted her life prolonged when there was no hope.

"I don't think it is widely appreciated just how damaged her brain is," said Walker, an internist, who has followed the case closely by reading the public record.

Schiavo's cerebral cortex, he said, is mostly gone. It was destroyed by the loss of oxygen she suffered when she had a heart attack 13 years ago. Once gone, the cortex cannot grow back, Walker said. The space it once occupied in Schiavo's skull is now filled with spinal fluid.

"The cortex does all our thinking," he said. "Some people argue that it's responsible for personhood. Without a cortex, you can't think, feel, have consciousness."

Schiavo is "awake but not aware," Walker said. Parts of her brain that control reflexes and other basic bodily functions still work. So she can sleep, breathe, blink and make the other moves that fuel the faith of those who seek to save her.

Her lack of consciousness is so complete that, according to Walker, if her feeding tube were to be removed from her stomach, Schiavo would not suffer. His language is chilling; the picture he leaves, almost unimaginable.

"She cannot perceive thirst or hunger. She doesn't have the brain structures necessary for that kind of perception."

Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, dispute every word of this. They argue, through their lawyer, that Terri Schiavo is being treated like a piece of social junk.

"If the governor announced the next death warrant would be carried out by the dehydration and starvation of the defendant, ask yourself, "What would happen to him?"' said the Schindlers' lawyer, St. Petersburg's Patricia Anderson.

She dismissed Walker with one wondrous flourish. "If you ask me," she said of bioethics departments like the one Walker runs at USF, "they ought to be called departments of death."

This is the kind of inflammatory verbiage that gets nobody anywhere, the kind that Bishop Lynch also took issue with. This is the part of the case that disturbs me the most. On the path to argue for Terri Schiavo, language flies into exaggeration. Conventional medicine, science as we accept it, gets flat-out dismissed. Remember the moment last year when it was suggested Schiavo's condition may have been the result of a severe beating - with observers left to wonder if the unnamed perpetrator was her husband? The charge was never resolved.

Anderson directed me to a Web site - www.zimp.org - where you can see video of Terri Schiavo. Her eyes are open. She moves her head. Anderson calls this consciousness. Walker, I think, would call this a moment of Schiavo being awake, but not aware.

Which do you believe? One of several physicians who have looked at this case, or a lawyer who seems to lump the doctors into some nefarious cabal?

The Schindlers have been fighting for 10 years. Four times, an order to remove the feeding tube was issued. Four times, the Schindlers appealed. In his latest ruling, last week, Judge Greer said the Schindlers were trying to "relitigate the entire case."

Anderson was unimpressed. She's headed next to federal court. Never mind the odds. This is a crusade; she's the crusader. The rest - the doctors, the medicine, the facts about Terri Schiavo - is fine print.

An experiment - lock Dr. Robert Walker in a hospital room for 10 years with no therapy and no opportunity to communicate, and then deprive him of food and water until he's dead. I wonder how he'd feel about Terri Schiavo then?

In the end, all our days are in the hand of God, but having so many presume in favor of death is unutterably creepy. I'm sure they'd have happily sliced the baby in half (in King Solomon's famous case), too.

She dismissed Walker with one wondrous flourish. "If you ask me," she said of bioethics departments like the one Walker runs at USF, "they ought to be called departments of death."

This is the kind of inflammatory verbiage that gets nobody anywhere, the kind that Bishop Lynch also took issue with.

Many things about this case are revealing. I think it's pretty clear what bioethics has become--just a mishmash of rationalizations for the Culture of Death, as Wesley Smith has so well documented. Sadly, it also seems clear that the American Catholic Church is incapable of providing any leadership on the issue. It makes the Church's record on abortion seem positively glowing.

If death is defined as the soul leaving the body, you could probably make a legitimate argument that she died a long time ago. We can 'keep alive' an empty shelll, but what point is there to that?

That's the thing of it, though. There are still a lot of people who don't agree that she is a damaged as the article portrays (such as all the folks who've posted to the 5,000 post Terri thread.)

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