My Take on Terri Schiavo

Terri Schiavo died today. Virginia asked me what I thought about it, and by the time I had written down what I thought, I decided it was worth its own entry.

First of all, I find the way this case was handled by the media and this country was kind of disgusting. South Park made an excellent point last night (yes, South Park did an episode that took it's shoot at Terri Schiavo, and while it was out of line at times, it actually made a good point). Kenny was in a vegetative state, and they had lost the last page of his will which contained the end of the sentence "In the case where I am in a persistent vegetative state, please...". Well at the end of the episode, after the entire world was up in arms about Kenny, they find the last page, and it reads: "do not show me on national television in this state and make a big deal pushing political agendas based on me." This makes a whole lot of sense to me. That being said, I'm not sure this could have been avoided, as some kind of legal statement is necessary to judge future cases.

What this case does not address:

• Assisted suicide. Terri was not able to discuss her desires to live or die in her current state.
• A patient on life support. Basic life support includes breathing and circulation support. Advanced life support adds electrocardiography and fibrillation control. Terri needed none of this. You can question her quality of life (and we will soon), but she was not on life support.

Moving on. Terri.

I think there are a lot of outlying factors here. First of all, as far as I can see, there must be something fishy about this husband. There are several reasons that he could want Terri to die. The first and most obviously would be the large amount of money he stands to inherit. But let's give this guy the benefit of the doubt. He can say he needs to move on. But really, he's been living with some other lady for several years (in many states they would have a common law marriage), and even has kids in that relationship. So maybe he wants to legally move on, so he can marry his new wife. Still, he could just divorce her. And if his inspiration is really as simple as that he doesn't think Terri would want to live like this, then why did he wait fifteen years? Fifteen years!

The biggest question in my mind is whether anyone has the right to look at Terri, and question if her quality of life is high enough. Judging quality of life is a very slippery slope. If we look at Terri's life as "too low quality", why should we stop there? What about extremely retarded people (sorry I am lacking the more PC phrase here...)? Feeding tubes are not all that uncommon. Many people live on them, in an extremely more functional state than Terri. The idea of judging quality of life just seems like a very dangerous one.

In the end, idealistically, it seems like if someone wants to take care of a person like Terri Schiavo, why should they not be able to? However, this is not something that can be codified into law (we can all thank the CAA-Student government mess this year for the insertion of the word codify into my vocabulary). The fact is, there needs to be some default position of authority to address what is to happen to you in the case that you cannot answer for yourself. Law states it is the husband, before the parents. And I don't think that anything that congress/the president did was appropriate. The law says that her husband is to speak for her, and he did. He says she would not want to live. It is difficult to say that a parent is more appropriate than a spouse. There are going to be many cases where each would be more appropriate.

I guess in conclusion, I don't really trust the husband and his intentions. And I don't really trust congress and its intentions. And I feel sorry for the parents. I feel like much more could have been done. But it wasn't. And, unfortunately, they have no legal ground to stand on.

Most of all, I am looking forward to this story moving out of the media, so that her husband, her parents, and the country can move on.