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March 24, 2005
I've been watching the reverberations in the media in Australia of the Terri Schiavo case in the US. In this tragic case, because the family has split on the decision to "pull the plug", the case has gone to court, where there is a well-established body of law on the subject. The Schiavo case has been litigated for seven years, with the verdict to pull the plug upheld at every level (including the U.S. Supreme Court, by refusing to hear arguments).
So what do we have now? The US Congress and the US President have intervened in the medical treatment of Terri Schiavo in Florida. They have kicked the case to a Federal judge after the state courts had all ruled in favor of the husband. But what on earth is the federal government doing intervening into a private family matter about painful personal decisions? Surely it is not intervening on behalf of, and defending, Terri Schiavo's Roman Catholicism?
The Florida state is also intervening big time. It has gone another round in taking on Florida's courts so as to gain custody of Terri Schiavo. Jeb Bush, the Florida Governor, has relied on a medical opinion by a neurologist from the Mayo Clinic, who had not examined the dying woman, but believed she was not in a vegetative state after watching a video.
We can only infer from this that Terri Schiavo has become a political pawn in a Republican Party values campaign. Is not the US all about keeping politics and state-endorsed religion out of the private lives of individuals?
So what is going on in Australia by way of commentary?
The less said about the op.ed. by Doug Bandow The Australian downloaded from the Cato Institute the better. That piece attacked the character of the husband.
I heard Bernadette Tobin, director of the Plunkett Centre for Ethics in Health Care at Sydney's St. Vincents Hospital and Rosanna Capolingua, Perth GP and chair of the Australian Medical Association's Ethics and Medico-Legal Committee on Radio National Breakfast on Wednesday morning and read Tom Noble's 'The Hardest Choice' in The Age on Wednesday. This was the better of the two commentaries, even though the photo implied that Terri Shiavio was a conscious person, even though she has irreversible brain damage from fifteen years ago.
I was suprised at the absence of philosophers in this issue in Australia. Ethical issues are involved in this case, including the value and purpose of life, the moral obligations among family members, the significance of personal autonomy, and what it is to be a person etc.
Instead we had doctors doing ethics and they doing public philosophy very badly. None of the presuppositions were addressed.
The two doctors who were presented as experts on Radio National were pushing a right-to-life position on an euthanasia issue. This presupposed Terri Shiavo was a conscious person who could respond to those around her.
I was struck by this dishonesty, as Terri's life as a person ended long ago, and she would have no awareness of suffering from the lack of food and water. I was also shocked by the ignorance of the American legal situation about the patient having a right for her medical treatment to be guided by the court's judgement of her wishes.They ignored the principle of autonomy!
My ears picked up on that. I started sniffing the wind for a campaign? The case was being presented as medical neglect and as euthanasia, with both being judged to be wrong. The "culture of life" language was being deployed to say that pulling the plug on human life was wrong ---akin to a death sentence. The two doctors implied that consciousness was still present in a patient after 15 years in a persistent vegetative state,(meaning she cannot think, emote or remember; and they dismissed the viewpoint and expertise of the American doctors who had examined Terri Shiavo.
It was falsely implied that Terri was a young woman who lives with a very serious disability. So why would Australian medical experts dismiss the judgement of American medical experts who had examined the patient? Politics surely. It is the right-to life crowd pushing their barrow.
The ABC just went along with the Catholic right-to-life push. Now why didn't that suprise me? Still there should have been some form of balance to counter the tacit claim that the left are a bunch of moral relativists who can't be trusted to do what's right.
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This is all being played out just down the highway from here - and it comes down to these two facts.
Ms. Schiavo is dying.
And We are a nation of laws.
So there you have it.
An interesting website that comes from a very biased point of view is www.terrisfight.org. This is the site authorized by the patient's parents. It's worth a look.