Schiavo Column

Here is a column from today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel columnist Patrick McIlheran. I'm including it in its entirety because it's that good. Having been personally through this situation to a much lesser extent, the issue really hits home for me.

By the time you read this, it's entirely possible, if not likely, that Terri Schiavo will have been dehydrated to death.

If so, it becomes urgent to remember the nature of her death.

The case's dreary particulars seemingly are known to all: A woman, stricken young, has lived for 15 years under constant care. Her husband wants to put an end to it; her parents do not. Lawyers wrangle endlessly.

If hard cases make bad law, this case's details can serve as antidote.

One detail: Schiavo began this week brain-damaged but not brain-dead. She was not comatose; she was not unconscious. Her parents and some of her caregivers contend she shows emotion and responds to voices. Her husband and doctors say her brain is withered and she can feel no pain, but even her doctors aren't unanimous.
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Another detail: Such death is slow. Experts have opined that dehydration won't hurt, not once kidney failure leads to coma. But experts aren't unanimous.

Enlightening is the story of Kate Adamson, a woman whose feeding tube was pulled while she was in a persistent vegetative state in 1995. She recovered to tell of the agonizing hunger and fear. (Read more at www.weeklystandard.com)

Bear in mind, too, that Schiavo's case is not hopeless. Her prospects are dim, but her parents say experts have told them therapy could help.

If we learn anything from two cases this past winter - Sarah Scantlin, a Kansas woman recovering after 20 years in a persistent vegetative state, and Jeanna Giese, the Fond du Lac teen whose recovery from rabies was thought impossible - is that hope cannot be discarded.

Jeanna's father, John, said exactly that about the Schiavo case on a Milwaukee radio talk show Tuesday. (Hear a replay at http://www.620wtmj.com/620programs/charliesykes/weblog.asp)

Nor was Schiavo on life support. She was breathing on her own; her heart was pumping unassisted. She lacked, however, the ability to swallow and so was fed through a tube.

I wouldn't choose to eat through a tube. I would not wish to be confined to a bed.

That's not to say I'd rather be dead. The question is not how pathetic Schiavo's condition is but rather what are her options? The one the court and her husband have imposed on her is to die by slow starvation and dehydration.

Imposed: That's a key detail. This is not a right-to-die case. It is a right-to-kill case. Schiavo was not dying, any more than your average infant could be said to be dying by his inability to feed himself.

No one knows what Schiavo would have wished. Had she left any kind of advanced directive in writing, this wouldn't be a public issue.

As it is, her husband says she didn't want to be kept alive artificially, but her parents dispute this. While their view may be skewed by grief, his view might be skewed by his new girlfriend with whom he's had two children and by the money he must pay out of a malpractice award to fund Schiavo's care.

Plainly, Michael Schiavo's interests are conflicted. It is unreasonable to presume, in the face of family contradiction, that he can fairly choose death on his wife's behalf.

These details add up - to a crisis for Terri Schiavo, to a warning for the rest of us.

Death is becoming the default answer to long-term suffering, at least for some judges, lawmakers and opinion-makers. Schiavo, it bears repeating, left no written instructions on being euthanized, and her wishes are unknown. The presumption in a family dispute, then, would be toward life - only now we see that a succession of judges and a frightening swath of Congress presume instead: Better dead than disabled.

We are also on warning about the tendentious nonsense that will be used to justify killing inconvenient people who can't gainsay the decision.

The Washington Post's Richard Cohen in a column Tuesday ("When politics gets in the way of a tragic family matter") called any intervention to save Schiavo an intrusion. Well, yes, as stopping child abuse is an intrusion. It is her family itself that appealed to lawmakers.

Worse is the third-rate slander that intervention is simply political opportunism. This rot is peddled just as we are told that most Americans want Schiavo to starve to death - in what possible way is it opportunism to do the opposite of what most people tell pollsters?

The only reasonable conclusion is that those seeking to save Schiavo's life are acting from conviction. Yet we are thus warned: Noble motives won't save you from opprobrium if you stand against the presumption toward death.

So be warned. Schiavo's life is being taken without her consent, being taken by the law in a way so cruel its imposition on a prisoner would be considered an atrocity.

As Americans age and medicine increasingly staves off what were once certain deaths, more people will be alive under conditions few would envy. Be warned that you might find yourself regarded as better off dead - and the Schiavo case may make it easier for others to make that decision for you against your will.