The arguments of those who approve of the decision to take away Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube appear to make sense only if you don’t think about them too much.
Florida Judge George Greer was convinced by Terri's husband Michael Schiavo that Terri, who was brain damaged 13 years ago when she had a heart attack at the age of 26, wouldn't want to live this way.
To someone like Michael Schiavo, growing up during the last few decades and hearing about all the right-to-die concepts, that might sound reasonable, but when you start to think about it, it's really not. As a matter of fact, the whole right-to-die program for people like Terri and the way it is supposed to work without doing harm to anybody is so confusing, that there is a much greater chance that Terri Schiavo – even without the little bit of rehabilitation that her parents are pleading for — will sit up in bed and start talking sentences tomorrow morning than that we will ever get this whole matter straight.
Terri isn't just lying there. She is not in a coma. She smiles at her mother. She reacts to music. She makes sounds at appropriate times as if she is attempting to communicate. There are videotapes of her doing these things that can be viewed on the internet. Nevertheless, during the court proceedings, her husband succeeded in convincing the judge that she is permanently unconscious.
However, even though he thinks she is unconscious, he finds it so intolerable that she should have to undergo this experience, that the feelings of her heartbroken parents, who may have to witness her starving to death for two weeks, and the feelings of the tens of thousands of Americans who find it revolting that she is being killed, simply don't count.
Why would the feelings of an allegedly unconscious person be so important as to outweigh the feelings of so many?
In order to understand where this confusion is coming from, we have to see the right-to-die movement for what it is. It is billed as a progressive, modern, psychologically aware attempt to improve medical care by helping people come to terms with their approaching death. In reality, however, it is an outgrowth of an end of the twentieth century anti-technology hysteria.
Medicine has gone through an awkward stage during the last few decades. We knew how to resuscitate people, but not how to rehabilitate them. People feared that we would have to take care of hundreds of thousands of unconscious bodies. A weird pseudotheology emerged, implying that these people were really dead and needed us to release them, and a weird pseudoeconomics about how they were going to drain all our resources. Many nurses, doctors, hospital administrators, and judges shared these fears along with the general public.
But now we are actually learning how to rehabilitate patients with impaired consciousness. The New York Times Magazine on September 28th published the story of Daniel Rios, a man with many of the same symptoms as Terri Schiavo. The careful measurements taken of his brain activity in response to different situations and the diligent recording of his progress toward greater and greater consciousness make the whole proceedings of the Terri Schiavo case look about as ridiculous as the trial in Lewis Carroll's book, where the Queen looks at Alice and says, “Off with her head!”
Judge George Greer refused to allow Terri to have swallowing lessons before the feeding tube was removed, saying that would be like relitigating the case.
Of course the case should be relitigated. Even criminal cases are reopened when new evidence emerges!
If states insist on legislating medicine by defining certain diagnostic categories as irreversible, then the legislators should be on call like emergency physicians to change their laws immediately when new discoveries are made.
The reason it is so confusing to try to use right-to-die concepts is that they are based on hysteria and they don't make sense. It is Michael Schiavo who won't let go. Immersed in right-to-die ideology, he is still clinging to some old remark that his young wife made about not wanting “tubes” in an era when everyone was discussing this topic in a fearful way. If she knew about the rehabilitation that Daniel Rios is getting, she would want it too. It's a no-brainer.
Dr. Olevitch is a clinical psychologist and author of Protecting Psychiatric Patients and Others from the Assisted-Suicide Movement Insights and Strategies (Praeger, 2002).
