Posted on 05/22/2005 8:17:40 AM PDT by aculeus
Theresa Marie Schindler was born on December 3, 1963, to prosperous and devoutly Catholic parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, in a Philadelphia suburb, Huntingdon Valley. Robert Schindler was a dealer in industrial supplies. Mary Schindler was a full-time wife and mother. They named their first child for Saint Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic who believed the Carmelites insufficiently reclusive and so founded a more restrictive order. We have only snapshots of Theresa Marie Schindler's life before the series of events that interrupted and eventually ended it. According to newspaper accounts published in the wake of those events, there had been the four-bedroom colonial on the leafy street called Red Wing Lane. There had been the day the yellow Labrador retriever, Bucky, collapsed of old age in the driveway and Theresa Marie tried in vain to resuscitate him. There had been the many occasions on which her two gerbils, named after the television characters Starsky and Hutch, got loose and into the air-conditioning unit in the basement.
She gained more weight than she wanted to. The summer she graduated from high school she went on a NutriSystem diet and began to lose the weight. Until then she hung out at the mall. She did not date. She bought her little brother Bobby his first Bruce Springsteen album. She pasted birthday cards into a scrapbook. She read Danielle Steel novels. She saw An Officer and a Gentleman with Richard Gere and Debra Winger four times in one day. She went to a Catholic grade school and a Catholic high school, where the single activity listed in her yearbook entry was "Library Aide," an extracurricular effort on which she and a friend had settled for the express purpose of having something besides their names in the yearbook.
(Excerpt) Read more at nybooks.com ...
For example:
(Imagine it. You are in your early twenties. You are watching a movie, say on Lifetime, in which someone has a feeding tube. You pick up the empty chip bowl. "No tubes for me," you say as you get up to fill it. What are the chances you have given this even a passing thought?)
Good article, thanks for posting this.
Excellent article, especially given who wrote it and where it appeared (about the only more surprising place for an article like that to appear would be Harper's).
Didion, like Garry Wills, actually got her start at National Review.
There is nothing to make us believe that the next one will not be close. IT very likely will be.
When elections are close single issue voters become very important. There is substantial proof that President Bush Carried Ohio on just three issues... gay marriage, abortion, and the war on terror.
We have now added a 4 th issue.. the right to life for adults as well as unborn babbies.
These issues are not large issues to a majority of voters. They may effect, in a state like ohio, no more than one to two hundred thousand voters each. Out of 5.5 million voters 400 thouand does not seem like much. Each issue effects less than 2 percent of the voters.
Buts Ohio was won by only 120 thousand votes. Perhaps as many as one third of the 400 thousand voters on these issues are registered Democrats. That is 150 thousand voters.
Had the right to adult life been an issue last fall, then it is likley that the President would have piced up another 40 thousand votes and Kerry would have had 40 thousand less. That would make the margin of victory 200 thousand instead of 120 thousand.
When the media reports that 60 percent of the public supported killing Terri, it thinks the issue has no political value. But the 60 percent who approved of the killing will not vote in future elections on that issue. Even most of the people opposed to the courts rulings will not make it defining issue in future elections.
But the 2 percent who do are voting for conservative candiates in order to get consevative judges.
People wonder why Frist is letting the Judical nomination thing run on and on and on. The fact is the polls most likely do favor the Democrats on the issue. But that is not the point. The important factor is whose votes will it effect and how many.
What the Democrats are doing is driving away conservative "value issue" democrats in swing states. The more Ried, Kerry, Kennedy,and Pelosi do , the harder it will be for them to carry Ohio, and other swing states.
The Democrats do not understand politics.. Not like Karl Rove does.
The name of the game is not approval or disaproval in the polls. The name of the game is how many votes will be changed to hurt or help us. HUrting their prospects is what is happening to Democrats. At the present time only the Clintons understand it.
Note the Clintons are not touching the judicial nomination situation much at all. It is a loser for Democrats.. and the Clinton's know it.
Excellent article, very well researched and written. I'm quite surprised it appeared in the NY Review of Books, but good for them. Their readers need to read this.
Great post!
There is another error in their calculations. The way the question was framed in many polls made it sound as if she were brain-dead and on all sorts of life support--not just a feeding tube. When the question was asked using the actual facts of the case, a majority of people thought she should be allowed to live. So there might be an even higher percentage of voters who will vote on this issue than originally thought.
The author does a good job of explaining all the smoke screens that were used to blur the real issues of Terri's case, that led to public confusion about what was really happening.
I wish every FReeper and anyone else who wanted her killed would read this.
Pinging a few friendly types.
Thank you for posting this. Fascinating and thoughtful.
ping
Thanks for the ping.
I was pleasantly surprised by this piece. It's obvious the writer is disgusted at what was done to Terri.
Never imagined myself saying this but ... God bless Joan Didion. Her arid style, which I don't care for in her fiction, is just right for shining a cold, clear floodlight on this case. Thanks for posting this.
It will be interesting to see what letters to the editor it provokes.
"It will be interesting to see what letters to the editor it provokes."
Indeed. But I'm more interested to see what the "Terri's right to die" camp will say about Didion's article than what our side will say. I'm pretty sure most of the letter-writers on our side will express profound gratitude to the author.
I feel a sense of relief to see this article published. Didion cannot be dismissed as right-wing, religious or emotionally addled. She has maintained a veneer of objectivity and has cleverly inserted all her horror of this event in between her dry, calmly written lines. And yet I'm certain the horror is there and that this article will turn more than a few minds to our way of thinking.
That was me pinging you BTW. Husband logs in and then I don't realize it and end up posting under his name.
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/665awdct.asp?pg=1
Joan of NYRB
The Scrapbook almost spilled its morning coffee upon opening the June 9 issue of the New York Review of Books and finding that Joan Didion had written . . . well, a remarkably forthright and evenhanded account of the Terri Schiavo case. In fact, Didion's essay is easily the best treatment of the case since Eric Cohen's essays in these pages (see "How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo," April 4, 2005, and "What Living Wills Won't Do," April 18, 2005). Everyone should read it. We're not joking.
Now, we always expect that Didion's prose will be sharp. What we weren't expecting was that she would aim her blade at liberals, especially the type who labeled as "fundamentalists" all those who felt that Michael Schiavo shouldn't be allowed to kill his wife. Here's Didion:
That this was a situation offering space for legitimate philosophical differences seemed obvious. Yet there remained, on the "rational" side of the argument, very little acknowledgment that there could be large numbers of people, not all of whom could be categorized as "fundamentalists" or "evangelicals," who
were genuinely troubled by the ramifications of viewing a life as inadequate and so deciding to end it. There remained little acknowledgment even that the case was being badly handled, rendered unnecessarily inflammatory. There was an insensitivity in the timing of the removal of the feeding tube, which took place on the Friday before Palm Sunday, meaning that the gradual process of dying coincided with a week that for Christians has specifically to do with sacrificial suffering and death. "Oh come on," someone said when this was mentioned on a cable show. There was a further insensitivity in the fact that the tube was removed at all. If the sole intention is to terminate feeding and hydration, there is no need to remove a gastric feeding tube. All anyone need do is stop plunging the formula into the tube. . . . In this case, in the absence of some unusual circumstance that remained unreported, the sole purpose of actual removal would seem to have been to make any legally ordered resumption of feeding difficult to implement.
And here's Didion on the badly reported facts of the case:
Theresa Schiavo was repeatedly described as "brain dead." This was inaccurate: Those whose brains are dead are unable even to breathe, and can be kept alive only on ventilators. She was repeatedly described as "terminal." This too was inaccurate. She was "terminal" only in the sense that her husband had obtained a court order authorizing the removal of her feeding tube; her actual physical health was such that she managed to stay alive in a hospice, in which only palliative treatment is given and patients without antibiotics often die of the pneumonia that accompanies immobility or the bacteremia that accompanies urinary catheterization, for five years.
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