If someone were to put a dog down the way that Terri Schiavo was "put down," there is no doubt that they would spend some serious time behind bars. But since Terri was "put down" at the behest of Florida circuit court judge George W. Greer, it makes her murder nice and legal.
I do not pretend to know all the intricate issues surrounding the Schiavo case, least of all the legalistic finessing that eventually sealed her fate. What I do know is that the case has left me very troubled about the state of our culture.
From the outset, it was evident that there were two distinct factions and that the Schiavo case was about more than granting a dignified death to a woman whose quality of life seemed beyond repair. On the one hand there were legions of people all in favor of Terri’s right to die. On the other there were large numbers of people who hold life sacrosanct, particularly in light of the persistent indicators that Terri might not have been nearly as "persistently vegetative" as the one physician who examined her might have us believe.
While making the rounds of media outlets last week, it was apparent where the sympathies of most of the mainline media lay. The gusto with which they attacked those who thought that starving Terri Schiavo to death was inhumane betrayed their bias. Lou Dobbs, one of the talking heads from "the most trusted name in news" was particularly porcine in his condemnation of those who wanted to err on the side of caution. Referring to the Schiavo case as a "right to die" issue and to those who opposed the right to die as the "hard Christian Right", it almost intimidated me for believing that maybe starving someone to death wasn’t necessarily the most dignified way to go. But then the Left is very good at attaching moral superiority to concepts that are grotesquely distasteful, to be kind.
I thought about the hypocrisy of those who firmly believed that watching Terri waste away unaided over a period of two weeks was a good thing, while simultaneously believing that lethally injecting a murderer like, say, Scott Peterson was cruel and unusual punishment. I thought about the near perfect state of newthink and doublespeak at which we have finally arrived where we can simultaneously condemn a perfectly innocent, albeit defective, woman to death by starvation and decry the execution of a convicted murderer as being inhumane.
all this was done within an atmosphere of perfect legality where judges look at what they consider to be the letter of the law without looking at the underlying spirit of that law. There is no doubt that Terri’s lot in life was unenviable. But was it really so unenviable that she needed to be murdered to make it okay? While the term "burden of proof" plays a large role in our system of jurisprudence, I do not for one minute believe that justice was served by killing Terri. For one thing, I cannot imagine that in the absence of a living will or some other documentary proof that indeed Terri wanted to die, the courts would simply take the husband’s word for it that she did. and in the absence of independent outside medical confirmation that Terri was condemned to exist in an "irreversible persistent vegetative state", it seems to me Judge Greer and his cohorts at the federal level were rash.
The first thing that they teach prospective physicians in medical school is that they should "do no harm". It seems to me that that the concept of "harm" has undergone a transformation of astounding proportions when I see the videotapes of Terri with her family. The creature lying contorted on that bed was definitely damaged. But from the glow that came to her eyes and the smile that came to her face whenever her family was with her does not resemble "vegitativeness" in any form. On the contrary, maybe there was a chance to improve her condition through intensive therapy. God knows the funds were there to do that, but it seems that Michael Schiavo thought it was a waste of money. So Terri was condemned to death on the say-so of Dr. Ronald Cranford whose overweening interest in medicine is to help people die, with the help of a cabal of judges that didn’t seem to understand the finality of death.
Maybe Michael Schiavo did or didn’t gain something from her death; who knows? But the idea that the life of a woman that was loved by her family the way Terri was loved can legally be thrown away through neglect like last week’s newspaper isn’t merely distasteful, it’s immoral.