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IN 1990, 24-year-old Terri Schiavo suffered a grievous heart attack. Doctors surmised that a potassium imbalance caused the cardiac failure, which cut off oxygen to her brain. She went into a permanent vegetative state. There are at least two theories to explain the onset of such a dramatic ailment for someone so young. Some doctors report that she might have suffered from an eating disorder that might cause the heart to stop beating for several minutes. Others, particularly Dr. W. Campbell Walker (who studied Terri Schiavo's 1991 bone scan chart), indicate that she might have been the victim of domestic violence. He said: "This patient has a history of trauma, including multiple injuries to the ankles, knees, ribs, sacroiliac joints and thoracic vertebrae." For the past 15 years, Terri Schiavo has lived in one nursing home after another, most recently at the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida. The medical profession is united in its view that her condition will not improve, but that her body may live on for some time.
In 2000, Terri Schiavo's husband, Michael Schiavo, approached the courts to allow her to die with dignity. Her parents allege that Michael, who has divorced Terri and is now in another relationship, simply wants her to die so that he can get on with his life. Schiavo is not concerned with Terri's interests, they claim, while he argues that their obsession does not square with her wish to die. The issues are complex, and the courts have held for Schiavo (though, since 2000, the courts ordered the feeding tube removed thrice, but asked for it to be reinstated twice on the grounds that legal challenges remained). In sum, the Florida High Court held repeatedly that reflexes in Terri Schiavo's brain stem triggered her few movements, and that her cerebral cortex had atrophied quite dramatically. In other words, the courts argued that Terri Schiavo had ceased to be a person and had devolved into a mass of cells. For this reason, the High Court decided, her feeding tube should be removed and she should be starved to death.
The matter might have rested there, as it has for scores of others whose families have fought over what remain of their lives. Terri Schiavo had been only 24 when she went into this state, and so she had not left any written document of her wishes. Such a "living will" is now commonplace, but not for someone so young. The trauma of the family, however, quickly became a political instrument for the right wing. The United States Congress, dominated and controlled by the conservative section of the Republican Party, and President George W. Bush intervened in the debate. Congress passed a hasty Bill that referred the Terri Schiavo case to the Federal, rather than the State, judicial system. Dramatically, Bush's aides woke him up at 1 a.m. on March 21 to sign the Bill outside his bedroom. The political manipulations provided fodder for the 24-hour news industry, as it made the details of Terri Schiavo's legal and familial business the entertainment of the public.
The conservatives had a natural reason to get involved in the case. That the courts decreed that her consciousness and not her cells govern Terri Schiavo is sufficient to incense the radical right wing. Honed on an anti-abortion movement that thinks that even the smallest agglomeration of human cells is "life", the radical right wing believes that Terri Schiavo is alive until her entire body stops to work. To assist them, Terri Schiavo's parents brought in Randall Terry, the founder of the anti-abortion Operation Rescue movement. Alongside Randall Terry came a host of right-wing organisations, which used the issue not only to energise their base, but also to raise money. The Reverend Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition told The New York Times: "What this issue has done is it has galvanised people the way nothing could have done in an off-election year. That is what I see as the blessing that dear Terri's life is offering to the conservative movement in America." Florida Governor Jeb Bush is using the event to shore up his conservative Christian credentials among this base for a 2008 presidential run. Without these hard-core activists, it is hard to ensure one's nomination as the Republican candidate.
THE Terri Schiavo case has enabled the agenda of the Republican Party and the Bush administration, apart from the ideological conservatives. On the second anniversary of the Iraq war, on March 15, a poll conducted by The Washington Post found the population disenchanted with the war. More than half the population felt that the war had not been worth the casualties, and 70 per cent found the U.S. casualty rate unacceptable. Of the President's role in this, 57 per cent found it unacceptable. A CNN poll conducted around the same time found that two-thirds of the U.S. population disagreed with the Bush administration's assessment that the Federal social security scheme is financially untenable. The majority also disliked its plan to privatise social insurance.
The Bush administration began its second term on two planks: Iraq and the export of "freedom" to West Asia (foreign policy) and the privatisation of social security (domestic policy). The people disagreed with the Bush plans and left the party in a hole. On March 21, Congress passed the Bill on Terri Schiavo and threw a smokescreen around the genuine political problems of the administration. An indication of this hypocrisy is that the Congressman who proposed the Terri Schiavo Bill, Tom De Lay (Republican from Texas), signed off on the death of his critically ill father in 1988. De Lay calls Michael Schiavo's desire to remove the feeding tube an "act of barbarism", though he had himself authorised such an action for his own father.
The Democratic Party has lived up to its role as an Opposition in at least one area: the installation of the judiciary. In Bush's first term, his ideologically conservative and right-wing Christian judicial nominees were not confirmed by Congress, a necessary step to their installation on the bench for life. It appears that the Democrats plan to use any congressional rule to prevent the Bush administration from getting its way on judicial appointments in the second term as well. The Terri Schiavo case has allowed the Republicans to argue that the courts are too liberal, too out of touch with the wishes of ordinary Americans. After gay marriage, the Terri Schiavo case has provided an opportunity to lambast the judiciary without restraint. Both Republican and Democratic lawmakers nominated the judges who sit on the Florida State Court and on the Federal Bench in Atlanta (both of whom found for Michael Schiavo against his in-laws). Nonetheless, the Republican Party has used this case as a way to broker a realignment of the courts to favour a radical right-wing agenda. Judge George Greer of the Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court recognised the attack on the judiciary and warned: "The executive branch is not superior in the area of judicial matters."
The most hypocritical aspect of the Terri Schiavo case, however, is not in any of this. While the President and the Republican leaders waxed on about the rights of Terri Schiavo, they passed a Bill to cut back on the state's commitment to the health care needs of the population. Medicare, the state programme to fund the health needs of the elderly and the disabled, is not only to be scaled back, but the needs of its beneficiaries are to be handled increasingly by private health care providers. The Federal government has scaled back its fiscal outlay, and is now to rely upon already cash-strapped State governments to pick up the costs. One estimate from the Congressional Budget Office suggests that the States will have to pay $89 billion over the next eight years to keep Medicare afloat. Nursing home inmates, who typically have an income of less than $12,000, have previously leaned upon Medicare to cover their residential costs and Medicaid to pay for their prescription drugs. That is no longer the case. With this Bill, there will be no one able to pick up the costs to maintain Terri Schiavo in her nursing home. She is one of the indigents who rely upon state support to survive. The Republicans do not want her to die, but they will not let her live either.
THE Terri Schiavo case is more than the hypocrisy and opportunism of the political Right. She is principally a disabled person. The U.S. has a very strong law that defends the disabled against discrimination (The Americans with Disabilities Act, 1990). The public, however, has a very unclear idea of the rights of the disabled, and of the moral issues that surround the situation of the severely disabled such as Terri Schiavo. While the Terri Schiavo case exploded, the Academy Award for best picture went to Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. The film tracks the life of a boxer, Maggie (played by Hilary Swank), whose career ends with a severe physical disability, spinal cord injury. Unwilling to live in her condition, Maggie begs her trainer Frank (played by Clint Eastwood) to kill her in her nursing home. This is what he does.
The film is not alone; it is joined this season by Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside, also an Oscar contender. It is about "mercy killing". While Eastwood's movie swept the awards, it provoked little discussion in the mainstream media about the ethics of euthanasia. Disability rights activists pointed to Eastwood's own poor record with The Americans with Disabilities Act. When a disabled person sued Eastwood in 1997 after he refused to renovate his $6.7 million resort to make the bathrooms accessible, he jeered about being extorted. Neither the Terri Schiavo case nor Eastwood's movie provoked a national discussion on the general disdain for the disabled. Given that Terri Schiavo is able to eat (albeit with a feeding tube), is she a person or has her personhood given way to the simple elements of her biology? If she remains a person, and yet cannot communicate with those around her, who gets to make the major decisions for her life?
This case comes a few months after the actor Christopher "Superman" Reeve died following a protracted struggle with his spinal cord injury. Reeve's horse-riding accident not only left him critically disabled, but also made him into an activist for increased medical research (including for "stem cell" research, made controversial by the Bush administration). The media championed Reeve as a superhuman figure capable of overcoming adversity and still cheerfully trying to make the world better. Reeve, in this sense, embodied the "American Dream". Whereas the Reeve case raised issues of medical funding and research, the Terri Schiavo case raises no such compelling issues. Reeve's was a right to live case, where he fought for medical breakthroughs to prolong his life (and that of others). Terri Schiavo's case, with her silence, is about the right to die, with her family embroiled in a bitter suit over who has the right to terminate a life that appears to be already over.
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