schiavoed

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Note: This “anything else worthy of attention” post seems necessary on this Good Friday and during this Easter Weekend. I offer it up in the hope that it will soften at least one hardened heart.

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Starting today, a new word should be in our language:

schiavo v. to allow a person who could otherwise survive to die through deliberate neglect for one’s own financial and/or other convenience.
Example: Michael wants to schiavo
his wife, so he can get on with his life.

schiavo n. a decision or course of action whereby a person who could otherwise survive is allowed to die through deliberate neglect for the purpose of one’s own financial and/or other convenience.
Example: Michael asked a judge to order a schiavo
on his wife, so he can get on with his life.

Imagine it’s 1989, the year before Terri Schiavo’s collapse.

Imagine a two-question poll.

The first question is:

Do you think a spouse, whose marital partner is suffering from partially reversible but non-terminal brain damage and only needs food and water to continue living, should be able to order that food and water be withheld until the brain-damaged partner dies, based solely on the spouses’ claim that the brain-damaged partner said (but not in writing) that he/she would not want to live in such a condition?

Does anyone think that more than 20% of those polled would have said “Yes”?

The second poll question is:

What would your answer be if you also knew that the spouse is having an intimate relationship with another person and has announced intentions to marry that person?

Can anyone imagine more than 5% would have answered “yes”?

I haven’t even added any of the other elements of this awful case, well-known to those of us who have followed it for years, that inexplicably and perhaps negligently never made the headlines until it was too-little-too-late time, that if added would have driven the pre-Terri “yes” answers to virtually zero.

But yet, here we are. It is not a pretty place.

As this is written, it appears that Terry Schiavo’s lawyers and advocates have lost all avenues for redress short of forcible or divine intervention. Terri Schiavo will die within a day, or two; or maybe she will “linger,” as the unconscionably insensitive will say, a bit longer.

So you, we, have to ask: How did this happen? How could this happen?

We have people whose “thinking” and “reasoning” we can’t even begin to fathom populating and nearly dominating public life in ever-increasing numbers.

We have a significant swath of the medical community with a compelling interest, against centuries of healing and caring tradition, in getting inconvenient or difficult patients out of the way, and that is showing us that we can no longer trust them. Instead, we must fear them, watch them, and be on guard against them.

We have judges who assume that their legal pronouncements are “law,” and that their “law” is superior to any law passed by mere legislators or approved by mere voters. We have allowed their word to prevail, acceding the rule of law to their agendas and whims.

We have people and groups who, no matter the facts or circumstances, cannot and will not act to save a life, or even support saving a life, if it might somehow, some way, make somebody they oppose or merely dislike look good, even when it means temporarily abandoning their supposed missions. To defend the indefensible, they will even insist that starvation and dehydration are not all that bad; in fact, they will claim that these mortal enemies of hundreds of millions of people around the world every day, when “medically permitted,” may bring on “euphoria.”

To those of you who “get it”: You, we, must stop this personally, through living wills. We must stop this legislatively through laws that give ironclad protection to non-terminal AND terminal people who have NOT specifically written that they wish to die, and that take ALL “futile care” discretion out of the hands of healthcare providers and insurers. We must stop this in the courts by ensuring that judges and those under consideration who can’t read the law, won’t enforce the law, or who insist that they can make up their own law, are removed from or prevented from reaching the bench. Finally we must stop this by simply ignoring and defying the tyrants in robes when their rulings are so outrageously and obviously extralegal.

And we must pray. I certainly don’t pray enough. You probably don’t pray enough. Pray for the Schindlers, whose unselfish persistence and unconditional love have set an unforgettable example and made us face the harsh realities of our antilife culture. Pray for others, perhaps including you, who took this so personally, that they get past (but never over) the bitterness of this defeat. Pray for politicians and judges, that they recognize the horror that has been wrought and prevent it from ever happening again. And yes, pray even for those who “benefit” from Terri Schiavo’s death, or who are incomprehensibly and occasionally cruelly cheering it, that they look in the mirror, recoil at what they have become, and rejoin humanity.

Finally, never stop reminding someone who is trying to do to another person what has been “successfully” done to Terri, that what they are doing is a schiavo.

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UPDATE:

As I suspect this case will be revisited when future spouses, parents, or kids look to “schiavo” their “inconvenient” relatives, the following is offered as proof that when poll questions were fairly framed, large and sometimes overwhelming majorities of Americans were on Terri’s side:

Zogby Poll (original Zogby link): Americans Not in Favor of Starving Terri Schiavo (poll with fair questions)
LifeNews write-up | April 1, 2005 | Steven Ertelt

(full text saved for fair use and discussion purposes)

Backup Link in case the other two go away)

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Polls leading up to the death of Terri Schiavo made it appear Americans had formed a consensus in favor of ending her life. However, a new Zogby poll with fairer questions shows the nation clearly supporting Terri and her parents and wanting to protect the lives of other disabled patients.

The Zogby poll found that, if a person becomes incapacitated and has not expressed their preference for medical treatment, as in Terri’s case, 43 percent say “the law presume that the person wants to live, even if the person is receiving food and water through a tube” while just 30 percent disagree.

Another Zogby question his directly on Terri’s circumstances.

“If a disabled person is not terminally ill, not in a coma, and not being kept alive on life support, and they have no written directive, should or should they not be denied food and water,” the poll asked.

A whopping 79 percent said the patient should not have food and water taken away while just 9 percent said yes.

“From the very start of this debate, Americans have sat on one of two sides,” Concerned Women for America’s Lanier Swann said in response to the poll. One side “believes Terri’s life has worth and purpose, and the side who saw Michael Schiavo’s actions as merciful, and appropriate.”

More than three-fourths of Americans agreed, Swann said, “because a person is disabled, that patient should never be denied food and water.”

The poll also lent support to members of Congress to who passed legislation seeking to prevent Terri’s starvation death and help her parents take their lawsuit to federal courts.

“When there is conflicting evidence on whether or not a patient would want to be on a feeding tube, should elected officials order that a feeding tube be removed or should they order that it remain in place,” respondents were asked.

Some 18 percent said the feeding tube should be removed and 42 percent said it should remain in place.

Swann said her group would encourage Congress to adopt legislation that would federal courts to review cases when the medical treatment desire of individuals is not known and the patient’s family has a dispute over the care.

“According to these poll results, many Americans do in fact agree with what we’re trying to accomplish,” she said.

The poll found that 49 percent of Americans believe there should be exceptions to the right of a spouse to act as a guardian for an incapacitated spouse. Only 39 percent disagreed.

When asked directly about Terri’s case and told the her estranged husband Michael “has had a girlfriend for 10 years and has two children with her” 56 percent of Americans believed guardianship should have been turned over to Terri’s parents while 37 percent disagreed.

APRIL 5 UPDATE:
Hugh Hewitt examines the relationship of Terri’s state-sanctioned starvation, the Pope’s death, and the inevitable value judgments papal electors will have to make in naming a successor to John Paul:

I bring this up as a way of reminding people that Terri Schiavo’s suffering and the suffering of her family were not purposeless, and despite the crush of media surrounding the Pope’s death, also far from forgotten. Her fifteen year struggle culminated on the eve of the most momentous decision the Roman Catholic Church’s leadership can take, and illumens the significance of the next few weeks. If many Cardinals had the idea that a “caretaker” pope might be in order, the drama in Florida works against that desire for a period of calm transition. Would the allies have selected a caretaker general on the eve of D-Day had Ike suffered a mishap?

Is the idea of a “Schiavo effect” on the conclave just another American’s preoccupation with American issues projected onto the much broader and much more indifferent world? Perhaps, but I don’t think so precisely because on matters of science and ethics, on morals and sharp breaks with the past, the United States sets the tempo for much of the world. The Anglican Communion is near schism because of actions taken by its American branch. Marriage is under its heaviest assault in the United States. Embryonic stem cell research got billions from the California taxpayers last fall. Cloning isn’t illegal and the announcements of the technique’s march are often though not exclusively associated with American science. Assisted suicide is not just the barbaric practice of the ever more anti-humanist Dutch, but the law of Oregon. If the Cardinals want a glimpse of where the anti-humanists want to head, they need only search through the American papers. I am certain most of them do. Whether it is the death penalty debate or just war doctrine, the United States often makes the weather on issues of moral consequence.