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Sophisticated tactics aid Schiavo's parents

BY MAYA BELL

The Orlando Sentinel

http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/nation/11126399.htm

ORLANDO, Fla. - (KRT) - Fifteen years ago, two leaders of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue walked into a motel in small-town Missouri and begged the night clerk for a fax machine.

At a nearby hospital, the parents of Nancy Cruzan were set to remove the feeding tube that had kept their daughter alive for nearly eight years. The activists were desperate to mobilize opposition to what they considered would be her murder.

"That's how sophisticated we were," remembers the Rev. Pat Mahoney, now executive director of the Christian Defense Coalition. "We were desperately trying to get the word out, desperately trying to get people out. There just wasn't much interest."

Today, Mahoney is a leader of an informal but growing network of conservative, religious and disability organizations who, with the click of a computer mouse, are enlisting hundreds of thousands of people in Bob and Mary Schindler's fight to keep their daughter Terri Schiavo alive.

The feeding tube that has pumped life-sustaining nutrients into the severely brain-damaged Florida woman's stomach for 15 years is scheduled to be disconnected Friday under a court order won by her husband, Michael.

The courts have agreed with Michael Schiavo that his wife is in a persistent vegetative state, and although she never wrote down her wishes made it clear in casual conversations that she would have rejected artificial life support.

But turning to the Internet, alternative media and grass-roots organizations to spread their right-to-life messages, what Mahoney calls the "faith-and-values community" has unleashed an avalanche of support for Schiavo's parents. That has prompted lawmakers in Congress and Tallahassee to file legislation on the Schindlers' behalf and ignited a national debate on the withdrawal of medically supplied hydration and nutrition, drawing the likes of the Vatican, and on Saturday, actor Mel Gibson to their cause.

The first goal of the campaign, Mahoney said, is to save Terri Schiavo's life. But he and others also hope to roll back the laws and ethical and medical guidelines that have evolved since 1990, when the U.S. Supreme Court recognized artificial sustenance and hydration as medical treatment. That ruling eventually cleared the way for Cruzan's parents to remove her feeding tube.

Now, patients or their health-care decision makers in every state have the right to refuse or withdraw artificial feedings under certain circumstances. That is something many of those joining the Schindlers' campaign reject as immoral and inhumane, and a step down the road to legalizing euthanasia.

"I cannot disagree more: Food and water is not medical treatment. It's ordinary care," said John Stemberger, the Orlando-based president of the Florida Family Policy Council. "Our primary interest is what the law should be, not what the law is, and this will be one of our top priorities: to create new public policy."

In October 2003, a flood of e-mails, phone calls and petitions to the state capital prompted the governor and key lawmakers to inject themselves in the bitter Schindler-Schiavo dispute. In record time, they passed "Terri's Law," which empowered the governor to order Terri Schiavo's feeding tube reinserted six days after it was removed by court order.

As predicted, the law was later struck down as unconstitutional, but today, with another deadline looming, the e-mail and petition campaign is reinvigorated.

Since Pinellas Circuit Judge George Greer last month ordered Terri Schiavo's tube removed this Friday, the Governor's Office has received more than 50,000 e-mails about the Schiavo case, and more than 107,000 petitions urging him to take immediate action to stop her "forced starvation."

The Center for Reclaiming America completed the petition drive in 48 hours, often collecting 5,000 names an hour - a record for the Broward County-based group dedicated to mobilizing Christian grass roots.

"Back in the Cruzan days, this was physically impossible. A few dozen activists on a phone or a fax machine couldn't reach people who would care," said Gary McCullough, now editor of the Christian Wire Service, who sends as many as five news releases on the Schiavo case to 6,000 recipients every day.

"But now," he continued, "you have the Internet, blogging, Web sites, discussions groups, organizations like NewsMax and talk-show hosts like Sean Hannity whose producers don't have to be called by someone like me. They see the groundswell and get on board. It's a whole different ballgame."

And one that, for the most part, relegates Michael Schiavo to the sidelines. His attorney, George Felos, said Michael Schiavo doesn't have the resources to counter "the massive smear campaign spreading disinformation about Mr. Schiavo and Terri's condition." But last week, Felos said he sent a package to each of Florida's state senators correcting "all the misconceptions" in the case.

But even critics who agree the campaign has distorted the facts and misled the public admire its success.

"Every politician ought to be taking lessons from this case on how to galvanize the population and obtain a following," said Kathy Cerminara, a medical-law professor at Nova Southeastern University and co-author of a treatise on the right to die. "They are masters at it."

Cerminara and other experts share Felos' dismay at the number of news reports and Internet sites that report as fact the Schindlers' belief that their daughter is merely disabled and could recover some brain function with proper rehabilitation. Like the Schindlers, many of the same sites demonize Michael Schiavo, noting he now lives with another woman and never mentioned his wife's end-of-life wishes until he won more than $1 million in a malpractice suit filed on his wife's behalf.

Bill Allen, director of the bioethics program at the University of Florida College of Medicine, agrees with court rulings that have concluded that the Schindlers are mistaking Terri Schiavo's involuntary reflexes as cognition and emotion.

And he understands why many in the public make the same assumption: They, too, have seen the video images, which first appeared on the Schindlers' Web site, of Terri Schiavo seemingly tracing a balloon with her eyes, or smiling at her mother's kiss. She looks very much aware and responsive.

Yet, the courts have ruled that she cannot respond. Since her collapse from a possible chemical imbalance 15 years ago, her cerebral cortex, the thinking part of her brain, has all but disappeared. Despite her sleep cycles and wake cycles, she is, the courts have found, unconscious. That is the cruelty of the vegetative state.

But Allen said he is most concerned that lawmakers will use what, at its core, is a gut-wrenching family dispute between loved ones to overturn good laws. Those laws, he said, have for more than a decade allowed Floridians like Terri Schiavo to reject or withdraw artificial hydration and nutrition if they so choose.

"The consensus is it's immoral to force medical treatment on people that they didn't want, and there is no reason to treat artificial hydration or sustenance any differently than any other medical treatment," Allen said. "This is not about food and water. This is an attempt for people with one value system to impose their values on the rest of society."

But from where he sits at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo., William Colby thinks the debate raging in Florida is healthy.

He was the lawyer who 15 years ago successfully fought Joe and Joyce Cruzan's battle to remove their daughter's feeding tube. At the time, they said they were giving the "gift of death" to a daughter whose "twisted body" no longer served her after a car accident robbed her of all but the most primitive brain function.

Today, Colby finds it appropriate for people who disagree about when life ends to revisit the issue of withdrawing artificial hydration and nutrition. He only wishes that Bob and Mary Schindler and Michael and Terri Schiavo had had the chance one distant sunny afternoon to have the same discussion over a backyard barbecue.

"It's not fun to watch sometimes, but the democratic process works through debate, and the silver lining about the Terri Schiavo story is that it's getting people to talk," Colby said. "That's how democracy works."

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© 2005, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).

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