Posted on 06/19/2005 8:19:40 PM PDT by CHARLITE
Just when it seemed that every liberal commentator on the Terri Schiavo case was starting to sound like Barney Frank, the great Joan Didion published a long and remarkable article on the case in the quite far left New York Review of Books of June 9. Frank, of course, took the occasion of last week's Schiavo autopsy results as yet another opportunity to denounce Republicans as "this fanatical party willing to impose its own views on people."
For those of you still somehow unaware, "imposing their views" is a semiofficial Democratic meme or code phrase meaning "religious people who vote their moral views and disagree with us." Didion, on the other hand, cut through all the rhetoric about imposing views and said the struggle to spare Schiavo's life was "essentially a civil rights intervention." This is a phrase of great clarity, particularly since Democrats have a long track record of protecting civil rights and Republicans don't. Behind the grotesque media circus, the two parties were essentially switching roles. In the first round of public opinion--the polls--the GOP took a beating. But in the long run, the American people tend to rally behind civil rights, and the party that fights to uphold them is likely to prevail.
On the "rational" or "secular" side of the dispute, Didion wrote, there was "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." Amen. There was also little admission that this was a "merciful euthanasia" controversy posing as a "right to die" case. Many of us understood, as the autopsy has now shown, that Schiavo was severely damaged, but a national psychodrama built around the alleged need to end a life without clear consent is likely to induce anxieties in all but the most dedicated right-to-die adherents.
"The ethical argument" Didion did not conclude that ending Schiavo's life was a wrongful act, but she seemed to be leaning that way. She wrote: "What might have seemed a central argument in this case--the ethical argument, the argument about whether, when it comes to life and death, any of us can justifiably claim the ability or the right to judge the value of any other being's life--remained largely unexpressed, mentioned, when at all, only to be dismissed."
That issue was slurred and muffled by the media and by shrewd, though completely misleading, right-to-die arguments that distracted us from the core issue of consent. George Felos, the attorney of Terri Schiavo's husband, Michael, told Larry King, "Quality of life is one of those tricky things because it's a very personal and individual decision. I don't think any of us have the right to make a judgment about quality of life for another."
Here Felos piously got away with adopting a deadly argument against his own position by presenting it as somehow bolstering his case. This can happen only when the media are totally incurious or already committed to your side. Michael Schiavo made a somewhat similar eye-popping argument to King: "I think that every person in this country should be scared. The government is going to trample all over your private and personal matters. It's outrageous that these people that we elect are not letting you have your civil liberties to choose what you want when you die." Americans were indeed scared that they might one day be in Terri Schiavo's predicament.
But Michael was speaking as though Terri Schiavo's wishes in the matter were clear and Republicans were determined to trample them anyway. Yet her wishes, as Didion says, were "essentially unconfirmable" and based on bits of hearsay reported by people whose interests were not obviously her own--Michael Schiavo and two of his relatives.
One hearsay comment--"no tubes for me" --came while Terri Schiavo was watching television. "Imagine it," Didion wrote. "You are in your early 20s. 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?" According to studies cited last year in the Hastings Center Report, Didion reminds us, almost a third of written directives, after periods as short as two years, no longer reflect the wishes of those who made them. And here nothing was written down at all.
The autopsy confirms the extraordinary damage to Schiavo and discredits those who tried to depict the husband as a wife-beater. But the autopsy has nothing to say about the core moral issue: Do people with profound disabilities no longer have a right to live? That issue is still on the table.
Yeah, I guess if they removed a catheter and foley bag and waited until her bladder burst and she died of sepsis, that would have also been OK.
Actually, and it was robertpaulsen who helped me understand this, the judge did not order the removal of the feeding tube. He ordered the "discontinuance of said artificial life support". A feeding tube is no more "artificial life support" than a soda straw to sip Ensure through. Realizing his error and to make sure that Terri would be good and dead, the judge later ordered that all nutrition and hydration be removed. You know, just to clarify things and to make sure that the end result was a corpse.
I don't know what you consider reputable. My Favorite Headache posted this on 3-28-05:
FR Exclusive: Michael Schiavo To Become Multi-Millionaire Shortly
And there's this from Newsmax and the NY Post:
An IV is surgically implanted. But no living will can contain instructions contrary to law. SO is she asking for the equivalent of suicide? Apart from that , what is the justification for killing someone who is not suffering? Is it justified to cause suffering to end a life that is " not worth living"?
Only problem is that you got it backwards. The citizens of Florida decided via the Florida Congress to not allow Terri to be killed by enacting Terri's Law. The judges decided that the citizens were wrong and found the citizens decision unconstitutional. So when you say the citizens decide you are not accurate - the judges decided that the citizens could not decide.
Hmmmm... So slavery was OK, right? Heck, it even passed review by the Supreme Court of the United States via the Dred Scott decision.
If FreeRepublic had been around in 1857 I can see you arguing that it is OK for slaveowners to dehydrate or starve their slaves because the Supreme Court had ruled that they were just property.
You have one last chance.
Our law doesn't allow a person to be euthanized anywhere except in Oregon. Understand that euthanasia has the ordinary meaning associated with shooting a horse with a broken leg. If my brain is broken, shoot me?
CRUZAN v. DIRECTOR, MDH, 497 U.S. 261 (1990
JUSTICE O'CONNOR, concurring.
I agree that a protected liberty interest in refusing unwanted medical treatment may be inferred from our prior decisions, see ante at 278-279, and that the refusal of artificially delivered food and water is encompassed within that liberty interest.
The State's imposition of medical treatment on an unwilling competent adult necessarily involves some form of restraint and intrusion. A seriously ill or dying patient whose wishes are not honored may feel a captive of the machinery required for life-sustaining measures or other medical interventions. Such forced treatment may burden that individual's liberty interests as much as any state coercion. See, e.g., Washington v. Harper, 494 U.S. 210, 221 (1990); Parham v. J.R., 442 U.S. 584, 600 (1979) ("It is not disputed that a child, in common with adults, has a substantial liberty interest in not being confined unnecessarily for medical treatment").
The State's artificial provision of nutrition and hydration implicates identical concerns. Artificial feeding cannot readily be distinguished from other forms of medical treatment. See, e.g., Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs, American Medical Association, AMA Ethical Opinion 2.20, Withholding or Withdrawing Life-Prolonging Medical Treatment, Current Opinions 13 (1989); The Hastings Center, Guidelines on the Termination of Life-Sustaining Treatment and the Care of the Dying 59 (1987).
Whether or not the techniques used to pass food and water into the patient's alimentary tract are termed "medical treatment," it is clear they all involve some degree of intrusion and restraint. Feeding a patient by means of a nasogastric tube requires a physician to pass a long flexible tube through the patient's [497 U.S. 261, 289] nose, throat and esophagus and into the stomach. Because of the discomfort such a tube causes, "[m]any patients need to be restrained forcibly, and their hands put into large mittens to prevent them from removing the tube." Major, The Medical Procedures for Providing Food and Water: Indications and Effects, in By No Extraordinary Means: The Choice to Forgo Life-Sustaining Food and Water 25 (J. Lynn ed. 1986).
A gastrostomy tube (as was used to provide food and water to Nancy Cruzan, see ante at 266) or jejunostomy tube must be surgically implanted into the stomach or small intestine. Office of Technology Assessment Task Force, Life-Sustaining Technologies and the Elderly 282 (1988). Requiring a competent adult to endure such procedures against her will burdens the patient's liberty, dignity, and freedom to determine the course of her own treatment. Accordingly, the liberty guaranteed by the Due Process Clause must protect, if it protects anything, an individual's deeply personal decision to reject medical treatment, including the artificial delivery of food and water.
Well of course. The citizens cannot pass an unconstitutional law. C'mon.
Or are you saying they can?
Oh no! Not the dreaded robertpaulsen list! At least he's not threatening to dehydrate or starve you to death...yet.
I'm sorry, but that vent in your hospital room that prevents the room from being airtight is "artificially" keeping you alive. You must die, so we're having that vent sealed up by court order. (Shall cause the removal of any oxygen and other gasses useful in respiration) You once said you would want it that way after watching a movie, or something...doesn't matter what YOU said, really, we're just going to pretend you said whatever it is that we want you to have said. What are you going to do about it, you stupid vegetable. What with a new screwbuddy, you're no longer necessary. Die already!
I am saying there was nothing unconstitutional about Terri's Law, and the judges had no business in declaring it so. They simply did not like it as it did not agree with there own concept of who should be allowed to be killed in the state of Florida and who should not be allowed to be killed. They simply took over the job of the Legislature. It is called Judicial activism in case you did not know.
The "end of life laws" in Fl. were predicated on 3 events.
1. The Cruzan case.
2. The Browning case.
3. The Florida Constitutional privacy right.
End the hypocrisy? We knew that. End the story? We knew that too.
Hmmmm...maybe you're on the RobbyS list now. Silly...
Hey, I've got a list too:
People who conspired to murder Terri Schiavo by dehydrating/starving her to death:
Michael Schiavo
George Felos
Judge Greer
SUUUUURE let's talk about it some more. In the meantime, just ot be safe, let's starve and dehydrate a few more, what the heck!
Anyone else disturbed by the argument for killing Terri that went something like this: "So what? It happens every day all over the country."
I forgot...also the Quinlin case.
IF this was not state sponsored killing, then you're blind, deaf, and have no capacity to really understand human love... unless it's convenient. This was Euthanasia. And besides, as the pro-kill-terri crowd says 'it happens every day all over the world' Well hip hip hooray let's have a party celebrating freedom.
I simply cannot understand how anyone in their right mind can defend what was done to her.
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