csua.org/u/bk2 -> www.nytimes.com/2005/04/01/politics/01legacy.html?ex=1270011600&en=77fed61c998e78bc&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG Published: April 1, 2005 W ASHINGTON, March 31 - The life and death of Terri Schiavo - intensely p ublic, highly polarizing and played out around the clock on the Internet and television- has become a touchstone in American culture. Rarely hav e the forces of politics, religion and medicine collided so spectacularl y, and with such potential for lasting effect.
Ms Schiavo, the profoundly incapacitated woman whose family split over w hether she would have preferred to live or die, forced Americans into a national conversation about the end of life. Her case raised questions a bout the role of government in private family decisions. But her legacy may be that she brought an intense dimension - the issue o f death and dying - to the battle over what President Bush calls "the cu lture of life." Nearly 30 years after the parents of another brain-damaged woman, Karen A nn Quinlan, injected the phrase "right to die" into the lexicon as they fought to unplug her respirator, Ms Schiavo's case swung the pendulum i n the other direction, pushing the debate toward what Wesley J Smith, a n author of books on bioethics, calls " the right to live." "This is the counterrevolution," said Mr Smith, who has been challenging what he calls the liberal assumptions of most bioethicists. "I have bee n frustrated at how difficult it is to bring the starkness of these issu es into a bright public discussion. Experts say that unlike the Quinlan case, which established the concept t hat families can prevail over the state in end-of-life decisions, the Sc hiavo case created no major legal precedents. Already, some states are considering more restrictive end-of-l ife measures like preventing the withdrawal of a feeding tube without ex plicit written directions. "I am concerned about the erosion of a very hard-won multiple-decade proc ess of agreeing that these decisions belong inside families," said Dr. D iane E Meier, an expert in end-of-life care at the Mount Sinai School o f Medicine in New York. "We've always said that autonomy and self-determ ination does trump the infinite value of an individual life, that people have the right to control what is done to their own body. For social conservatives who argue that sanctity of life trumps quality o f life, Ms Schiavo came along at the right place and time, at a moment of their ascendancy in American politics. The election last November kep t Mr Bush in the White House and gave Republicans firmer control of Con gress, particularly in the Senate, where conservatives gained several se ats. Among those conservative freshmen is Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, who prodded Congress to pass a bill allowing a federal court to review the Schiavo case. The move prompted a backlash, with polls showi ng an overwhelming majority of Americans opposed to it, though there is no way to assess whether that sentiment will have lasting political effe cts. "I am amazed by the attention and the passions that have been aroused by this," Mr Martinez said. "It may be one of those issues that touches fa milies, that transcends the cultural wars." Others say that far from transcending the cultural wars, Ms Schiavo's ca se landed smack in the middle of them. "It may be that her legacy is to set off an ongoing debate in American pu blic policy about the sanctity of life and how we are going as a society to make decisions about when life begins, when it ends and what protect ions it ought to have," said Gary L Bauer, president of American Values , a conservative group. That language percolates through other debates that involve clashes of me dicine, politics and religion like the fights over abortion and embryoni c stem cell research. Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a Christian conse rvative group, drew the connection in an e-mail message to backers who m ourned Ms Schiavo. "We often hear about the culture of life that we are trying to protect," Mr Perkins wrote, "yet rarely do we talk about the culture of death."
|
http://csua.com/feed/