Politicians rush to write laws to run your life
Mike Thomas
Orlando Sentinel Columnist
March 18, 2005
The politicians are furiously trying to come up with laws to help Terri Schiavo's parents block her husband from removing her feeding tube.
If that were all they were doing, intervening in a family dispute with no repercussions for the rest of us, I would not be so troubled. But we are all being dragged into this.
The system we have for making end-of-life decisions is, by and large, a good one. Laws and practices have been well thought out by doctors, lawyers, ethicists, ministers and end-of-life experts.
Many of the judges who have ruled in favor of Terri's husband are conservatives appointed by Jeb Bush.
The only reason for the brouhaha is conflict between Terri's parents and husband. But because of that bizarre and rare circumstance, politicians are tinkering with a system that has worked well for thousands of families through the years.
The problem is that legislators cannot pass a law that basically says: "Feed Terri Schiavo."
They tried that in 2003, and the courts tossed it out as blatantly unconstitutional.
To pass a bill that has any chance of being applied in Terri's case, the politicians have to come up with one that applies to all of us.
And so legislators are working on measures that could force family members to maintain a relative in a vegetative state if they could not produce some kind of directive from that relative stating wishes to the contrary. Another proposal has vague wording about an "interested party" being allowed to intervene.
This is a frightening intrusion into the most personal and gut-wrenching decisions a family can make.
Do you know how your spouse feels about being kept alive in a vegetative state? Of course you do, even if you don't have a living will to prove it. Now, imagine if you were complying with your spouse's wishes to die in peace and the government forces you to keep him alive in some under-funded Medicaid nursing home.
There is a political agenda here. Religious conservatives have filed legal challenges in the past to block parents from making end-of-life decisions about their children, even when the parents were in agreement. One of the groups that has done this, Operation Rescue, was founded by Randall Terry, who is pushing the Schiavo legislation.
"I do not have the right to starve my children to death," Terry said after his group tried to intervene in the case of a 15-year-old Ohio girl left in a vegetative state after a 1992 accident.
Terry claimed the right to overrule parents who loved their child and made an agonizing decision after consulting with medical experts.
Terri Schiavo is the Trojan horse religious conservatives are using to pass laws that would open the door wider for such intervention.
And now Mel Martinez, among others, is pushing legislation in Congress that would drag the federal courts into the process.
Lawmakers disagree with the actions of state judges in one case, and so they toss together a bill that affects the entire nation. That type of knee-jerk reaction is indicative of how the politicians have handled this issue.
They are pushing measures that have consequences nobody can predict because the bills have not been thought out. Regardless of how you feel about Terri Schiavo, that is foolish and wrong.
Mike Thomas can be reached at 407-420-5525
or mthomas@orlandosentinel.com.
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