The Schiavo Case

I’ve really been trying to not comment on this one, because the whole situation is so dismaying and annoying and terrifying and disgusting. But I find I must.

Please, please, feel free to skip to another post if this topic upsets you. It does me, too.

I don’t know all the details of the Schivao case. I suspect that’s true of most people, almost certainly including the politicians flitting about it like moths on a flame (or flies on roadkill). Given that the courts that have been brought in to adjudicate the facts and law of the case, all through the state level and now into the federal level, have reached a decision that the politicians have steadfastly refused to accept, that’s almost a certainty.

Here’s one analysis. Here’s a bit more. I have read impassioned (if, to me, less convincing) posts on the opposite side of this as well.

I feel for both Terri’s husband and her parents. Both, I am willing to believe, are motivated sincerely to their positions. I am sincerely thankful that I don’t face the situation that they do. The various bits of character assassination regarding both parties (gullible, overwrought, irrational, exploited parents; evil, conniving, money-grubbing, unfaithful husband) aside, I wish them all some sense of peace about this.

Now, here’s what find really awful about the case.

Why in the name of God’s green earth have we had an emergency session of the US House of Representatives, following urgent last-second action by the US Senate, passing a law specifically designed to intervene in this one case?

A local medical decision, made by a legal guardian and confirmed by local state courts, specifically targeted by the two houses of Congress, and signed off by the President himself.

Does that strike anyone else as … odd? Or, depending on the wherefores you ascribe to it, horrifying?

I don’t know, and, frankly, don’t care about the motivation. It doesn’t matter to me if this is all an attempt to set some sort of legal protection that could eventually be extended to fetuses, or if it’s all a way to distract from various political scandals and brouhahae, or if it’s an attempt to back the play of the President’s brother, or if it’s all simply to make political hay and demonstrate ideological unity and other grandly pompous bits like that, or even that everyone was just so heart-struck and moved by Terri Schiavo’s plight.

That the Congress of the United States and the President would reach out and directly intervene in one family’s life, over a matter so gut-wrenching and personal that I suspect most folks have tried to ignore it because of how it hits home to them as to how they’d feel as Terri, or Michael, or Terri’s parents, is utterly terrifying, far more than any of the Homeland Security bumbling and foreign policy this-n-thats which have happened over the last five years.

The President speaks sagely about how, when there is doubt and ethical concern, we must fall on “the side of life” — and yet, as governor of Texas he signed off on laws restricting judicial appeals in capital cases. Not that there aren’t those on the other side of this case working to make some political capital out of it, and open to declarations of hypocrisy as well. But this final, clear, decisive abandonment by the GOP of the principle of Federalism, by openly (and likely unconstitutionally, as well as coming as close as can be to a Bill of Attainder) intervening in this case, represents to my mind the final straw differentiating operationally between the two parties, both of whom have now made it clear that they will use the power of the Federal Government to do whatever the hell they please, restrained (barely) only by the courts and not by any principle of the proper role of government.

I tell you this right now: if I were to lapse into a Persistent Vegetative State, I would trust my wife — hell, I would trust my previous wife — to choose the best course for me, both per se and far, far, far more than I’d trust Bill Frist or Tom Delay or George Bush (or anyone of either party living part-time in Washington). I’d trust a local court, when asked, to determine from my writings (like this one) that I have no desire to live on with a brain in that state, before I’d trust the US Congress to second-guess my will (or substitute their own) and ask a federal court to reevaluate that.

If nothing else, this case should convince everyone, everyone, to get a living will, dictating what extraordinary life-extending measures should be taken in case one loses one’s ability to do so oneself. Whether you’re afraid that your hubby is going to off you as soon as you fall asleep, or you fear that your parents will keep you unnaturally dangling on life support forever, it’s far, far better that you make that decision than anyone else.

Assuming, of course, that Congress and the President let you.