The War on Terri Part XIV

Good Friday, and if Terri Schiavo is conscious to any degree, she may rightly wonder why we have forsaken her.

Susan Konig wonders how her parents must feel:

I've been married to my husband for 14 years and I trust him implicitly. I trust him with the lives of our children. We named each other as the responsible parties in our wills. We filled out those living wills less than two years ago at the suggestion of our lawyer but I can't remember what I said. Probably that I would want them to hook me up to as many machines as they could find while they tried to figure out what was wrong with me. If I become that ill, I figure the Lord will take me if He wants me. In any case, the wills are in the filing cabinet if push comes to shove.

So here I am with a written directive and I honestly can't remember specifically what I directed or what my husband's wishes are. If Terri Schiavo, as her husband claims, said she wouldn't want to live that way, I wonder how sure he is. She was in her early twenties at the time of her collapse. If she had written it down, we would have to respect her wishes. And yet, would they have specified something beyond life support, which she was not on, beyond a comatose state, which she was not in?

And if this man had been by her bedside true to his marriage vows for all these years, I might cut him some more slack — but he has moved on and should have been disqualified as her legal guardian years ago because of the flagrant conflict of interest of living with another woman who has fathered his children.

Her parents on the other hand, have no such barriers to their interest in their daughter's well being. And they have not been visiting an unconscious person all these years. They have interacted with the disabled person their daughter has become. Being able to touch her, to nurture her, and to get a smile or a sound from her seems to have been enough for the woman and her mom and dad.

Your child is always your child. And the thing that a parent can do for a child as long as they live is to always be able to tell them, "I'm here."

Lawrence Henry wants to know who's responsible:

IS THE TERRI SCHIAVO CASE THE "IT" MOMENT OF NATIONAL POLITICS? Will this be the point at which country's consciousness turns, as it turned on the flights of two helicopters, one from Saigon, one from Washington, D.C., in the early 1970s? Or on the landslide brass-off the voters delivered to the political establishment decades ago in California?

It will depend on how the question gets answered, "Who killed Terri Schiavo?" Because, by the time this column appears, Terri Schiavo will have gone more than 150 hours with her feeding tube disconnected. She cannot last long.

So far, Democrats have acted as though they were most afraid the answer was going to be, "Democrats Killed Terri Schiavo." A little elementary political legerdemain could have made that one impossible. The Democratic leadership could have simply backed the bill to save Terri's life. That's what it was, after all, nothing more complicated than that.

The Democrats, stuck in Bolshevik oppositionism, couldn't do it. As a result, they still may get blamed.

Ideally, a conservative political movement would like to make the answer, "The Courts Killed Terri Schiavo." Several things argue in favor of that one. Notably, it's true. Most recently, the three-judge appeals court's panel's refusal to reconnect Terri's feeding tube should be seen for what it is: Slow-walking the case, and Terri, to death. That decision, now reaffirmed by the full Eleventh Circuit, shows the judiciary at its most remote, arrogant, and imperial, deliberately ignoring the will of Congress for a "de novo" review of the case.

The judiciary could have dodged that one, too, and simply made the case disappear. Some lower court judge long ago should have seen this case on its human merits and found a reason to set aside husband Michael Schiavo's petition. But judges, a score of them so far, have proved just as ossified as Democrats.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, the last resort, could pull some Solomon-like stroke from beneath his robes. If he doesn't somehow get Terri's feeding tube re-attached, and soon, he risks arousing a public answer like, "Anthony Kennedy Killed Terri Schiavo" or "The Supreme Court Killed Terri Schiavo."

John Tabin wonders if Terri Schiavo is in pain.

Denis Boyles thinks the Europeans view this situation through an anti-religious lens.

Andrew McCarthy calls a spade a spade:

Put another way, if PVS were considered a crime Terri had been indicted for, rather than a condition she is afflicted by, the record in this case would have been laughed out of court five minutes after an appellate tribunal started looking at it. Not because the proof was inadequate, although it surely was. Simply because the wrong standard was used. If a Florida court tried to deprive a person of life based on facts establishing capital murder that had been proved only by clear and convincing evidence, the editorial pages would be teeming with condemnation. Both the ACLU and the death-penalty bar would be lined up for miles outside the Supreme Court in anger over a due-process outrage. And they'd be right.

In the United States, we require proof beyond a reasonable doubt on all facts necessary to the judgment before someone is killed by the machinery of the justice system. Nothing less will do.

And I wonder why we are complicit in this wrongful death, as we were in the death of Another on this day so long ago.