The religious groups that had pleaded with government officials to keep a severely brain-damaged woman alive in Florida are now vowing to push for stricter legal standards when it comes to denying life-sustaining measures to ailing patients.
Terri Schiavo’s death some two weeks after her feeding tube was removed could set off a ”moral tsunami” engulfing other families in similar situations, said Carrie Gordon Earll, a bioethics and policy analyst with Focus on the Family.
”I think it would be naive and unfortunate for us to think this was an isolated incident with just one family,” Earll said on Thursday, hours after Schiavo’s death in Florida. ”It’s a watershed moment, not only for us, but for the nation. It may very well change how people view medical decision-making. I hope it does. I hope Terri didn’t die in vain.”
Schiavo (41) died on Thursday after years of legal battles between her husband, who said the tube should be removed, and her parents and siblings, who held out hope she would improve. Schiavo suffered brain damage in 1990 after a chemical imbalance caused her heart to stop.
Focus on the Family, based in Colorado Springs, was among the groups that pushed to have Schiavo’s feeding tube reinserted after state and federal courts sided with Michael Schiavo, who said his wife told him long ago that she would not want to be kept alive artificially.
Peter Howard, director of communications for the Catholic Diocese of Colorado Springs, said those court decisions leave disabled people who can’t speak for themselves vulnerable to a similar fate — regardless of their wishes.
”When a legal system finds any justification within its process to allow a deliberate killing of a person who is not dying, an innocent person, I think that there is an enormous hole in the process,” Howard said.
Bob Wenz, vice-president of national ministries for the National Association of Evangelicals, said Americans need to discuss bioethics as the medical field evolves.
”What we’re hoping will come of this will be some appropriate discussion and appropriate legislation to help define some of these issues,” he said.
But both Wenz and Earll said the conversation needs to go past laws governing medical decisions and into what they called the ”imbalance of powers” in the federal government.
After Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed on March 18, Florida lawmakers, Congress, President George W. Bush and his brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, tried to intervene on behalf of her parents, to no avail.
James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, lashed out at the judges who presided over the case.
”Every Florida and federal judge who failed to act to spare this precious woman from the torment she was forced to endure is guilty not only of judicial malfeasance — but of the cold-blooded, cold-hearted extermination of an innocent human life,” he said.
”Terri Schiavo has been executed, under the guise of law and ‘mercy’ for being guilty of nothing more than the inability to speak for herself.”
Earll said that, ultimately, elected and appointed officials in the federal government would have to take up the judicial issues, but Focus on the Family would continue to push for Bush’s judicial nominees. — Sapa-AP