Right to live with dignity

The Terri Schiavo case has brought us once again to the delicate question of who decides one’s right to live.

Terri is a 41-year-old woman living in a Florida hospice for 15 years – in a vegetative stage, with no upper brain function. Her husband made the request to end her misery by having her feeding tube removed. It was what she wanted, he said.

Ten state courts said yes, their decision in line with the United States Supreme Court’s standard that she would have wanted to go. And we’ve seen her on the TV screen – lying in bed, trying to smile, but we know that’s all she can do.

Terri’s parents, however, wanted to make a cause celebre of her case.

Writer Marjorie Cohn of Truthout/Perspective says that aided by Republicans in the US Congress and President George W. Bush, they are fighting to keep her alive. A memo circulated to GOP senators described the case as "a ‘great political issue’ because it will play to the ‘pro-life base’ of the Republican Party," writes Cohn.

Cohn writes that "Unprecedented emergency legislation rushed through Congress on the eve of the Easter recess has sent the Schiavo case into the federal courts for a new round of hearings. After he signed the bill in the wee hours of Monday morning, Bush said, ‘In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life."

This statute, writes Cohn, "directly contradicts Bush’s actions while governor of Texas. Then, Bush signed a bill that allows hospitals to stop feeding a patient whose prognosis is so poor that further care would be futile, if the patient cannot pay his or her medical expenses." Just last week, Cohn writes, a baby was pulled off life support in Texas, against his mother’s wishes.

The Schiavo case has turned into a political circus. According to Cohn, conservatives support the principle of federalism, or states’ rights. Each state should be able to maintain its own legal system, free from federal encroachment, according to this doctrine. But many Republicans have championed states’ rights only when they liked the outcome and rejected it when they didn’t."

Democrat John Conyers Jr. decried the legislation, which he said "wrests jurisdiction away from a state judge and sends it to a single pre-selected federal court. (In effect) we will abandon any pretense of federalism. The concept of a Jeffersonian Democracy as envisioned by the founders, and the states as ‘laboratories of democracy’; as articulated by Justice Brandeis will lie in tatters."

But one of the most tragic aspects of the Schiavo case, writes Cohn, "is the effect this legislation will have on family decisions for years to come. Although the Democrats agreed to the bill only if it were limited to Terri Schiavo’s situation, it will certainly open the floodgates to litigation which inserts the courts into private matters."

As of this writing Schiavo is in a vegetable state, with the whole world watching her slow death on the boob tube. People are watching when she will finally go, her state of degeneration, the day-by-day distortions on her face – as projected by the cruel cameraman. Where is the dignity in her situation? Even if the feeding tube were reinserted, she would never live as a normal human being.

One sure thing that has come out of reading about the Schiavo case is that people are now conscious of putting down in writing that they should not be allowed to live in the mercy of artificial life supports. Relatives of the suffering patient need not debate over the morality of euthanasia or mercy killing, but act on the patient’s wish to be released from his or her suffering and go in dignity and peace.

My Sri Lankan friend who lives in Canada, Victor Karunairajan, emailed his thoughts on the Schiavo case. "Just the other day I heard a loving daughter who was watching her father suffering with kidney and heart complications, saying that she would hope her dad would get his release soon – and she meant his death from all the suffering he was undergoing. When he eventually passed away she grieved a great deal but she was also happy that her dad was not suffering anymore.

"If you ask anyone of my age especially (past 60), one hope in respect of the inevitable is that we go away without suffering. I think this is a popular feeling. Would I want to be kept alive in a vegetable state unless of course I may be useful as a laboratory material for medical studies!!!

"Terri, no doubt, is beyond help to recover and whether she is suffering or not and is being kept alive in an undignified state in which all her human senses are literally gone, she needs the kind of love and compassion that the daughter I referred to above wished for her own father."

The question of one’s right to live suffers in the midst of hundreds of indigent patients – infants, children and adults – who die in hospitals or in their shacks because they have no food to eat, or they simply cannot afford the cost of medicines. Even if the most brilliant and caring physicians at the Philippine General Hospital do their best to save their patients, they stand hopeless with the very scant resources within the facility, and so are forever asking donors to help save the lives – and if our informant is correct – of at least six indigent pediatric cases every day.

The inability of the government to provide nourishment and medical care for these patients, and the hardheadedness of the church to not equate poverty with uncontrolled population explosion – do not these actions constitute pulling the plug even before it is installed?

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