The many who blame “the judges” for the legalized medical killing of Terri Schiavo are barking up the wrong tree.
To prevent a repeat of the kind of injustice that Schiavo suffered, we need to change the faulty laws that allowed it. No matter how good the judge, he has no choice but to follow the law. Nor does it do any good to thump on Florida Gov. Jeb Bush–as some supporters of Schiavo’s parents have–who also was constrained by law. He just can’t make it up as he goes along.
In the hierarchy of things that matter in a democracy, the rule of law is right up there with the protection of the cognitively impaired and voiceless, such as Schiavo.
So, if the nation is to move on from here and to give any meaning to Schiavo’s death, our first priority now must be to change the laws that seem to presume that the medically disabled are better off dead. The law must make it clear that we start with a fundamental presumption: Everyone wants and has a right to live.
To end anyone’s life, the burden of proof must fall on whoever wants to pull the plug, and the proof must be beyond a reasonable doubt. Hearsay evidence that anyone in a “vegetative,” minimally cognitive or any other kind of impaired state does not want to “live that way” is not sufficient proof. The proof must be clear and in writing. When there is conflicting or unclear evidence, the law must require that any decision err on the side of life.
Further, the law must clearly forbid the medical killing of anyone who is not terminally ill, such as Schiavo. It must make clear that providing food and water is not the same thing as keeping someone alive by artificial means, such as a breathing machine. If we can carry out “mercy killings” by withholding food and water–because someone cannot feed himself–then we endanger infants, paraplegics, ill popes, the impoverished who depend on food pantries and anyone else who needs help getting sustenance. The law must be unmistakable in its meaning: Feeding someone through a tube–a routine hospital procedure–is not the same thing as using “extraordinary measures” to keep a person alive. The law should require that living wills make this distinction clear.
In Schiavo’s case, I’m not convinced that her alleged pronouncements to relatives indicating that she didn’t want to be “kept alive on a machine” included an understanding that the option that would be chosen for her was to die of starvation and thirst. Nor am I convinced that her statement reflected a considered and deliberate desire, or merely conversation.
I’m sure others can think of other legal reforms that can be made to protect people in guardianship, such as Schiavo, against mistaken, self-serving, misinformed or malevolent family decisions to kill them. To say that the state has no role in protecting those in guardianship is to suggest that the state has no role in preventing child abuse or homicide.
That’s why 26 national disability rights organizations sought to intervene in the Schiavo medical execution proceedings. Among them was Not Dead Yet, a national disability rights group based in Forest Park. That group sees the Schiavo case as a civil rights issue, in which greater protections are required for tens of thousands of people with disabilities who, because they cannot articulate their own desires, must depend on substitute decision-makers. Mind readers, as it were.
Compassion may indeed drive these substitute decision-makers to end another’s life. But compassion for the most part is not a sufficient reason for ending a life, whether it’s a soldier putting a mortally wounded enemy “out of his misery” or an “angel of death” in a hospital.
The people in Not Dead Yet understand that compassion can be a dangerous thing when it is coupled with the arrogant assertions of the “right to die” movement. Legalized medical killing is not compassion, they say. It is contempt.
“People already have the right to refuse unwanted treatment, and suicide is not illegal,” the group says on its Web site. “What we oppose is a public policy that singles out individuals for legalized killing based on their health status. This violates the Americans with Disabilities Act, and denies us the equal protection of the law.”
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Some bioethicists have even started to argue that intellectually disabled people are not persons under the law. That hasn’t happened since slavery was legal.
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