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Jewish World Review March 30, 2005 / 19 Adar II, 5765
Linda Chavez
The dehumanization worked
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com |
As Terri Schiavo lay dying, her organs slowly mummifying from
the effects of prolonged, court-ordered dehydration and starvation, the
Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal from her
parents that might have saved her life. Her parents argued that Schiavo's
right to due process under the law had been denied, a claim summarily
rejected without even the pretense of a full hearing by a District
Court and upheld by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Less than one week
later, however, the Supreme Court sat in rapt attention as attorneys argued
a very different life and death case, this one involving a convicted rapist
and murderer whose case found its way to the high court because he is a
non-citizen, and who, it is alleged, had been denied full and adequate
access to diplomats from his home country when he was criminally charged.
In both cases, lower courts had already ordered the termination
of life in the case of Terri Schiavo, by refusing her food and water on
the basis of a Florida state court ruling; and in the case of Jose Ernesto
Medellin, by the judgment of a Texas jury that he was guilty "beyond a
reasonable doubt" of the rape and murder of two teenage girls in 1992.
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So, why did the Court give so much more deference to Medellin's
claims than to Schiavo's? It's hard to escape the conclusion that it is
because many people including the judges who have considered her case
believe that Terry Schiavo's disabilities render her no longer fully human.
And in this judgment the medical establishment is fully complicit. The very
term used to describe Schiavo's condition persistent vegetative state
conjures up images of a subhuman, sub-animal life form. As one health care
professional wrote me after hearing me on television describe the pain
Schiavo might suffer as she slowly dehydrated to death, "If you touch a
Venus fly trap plant (a stimuli) it will immediately close its petals (a
reaction). That doesn't mean it feels or cognizes [sic] that there is a fly
that has landed." Few public commentators have been as blunt, but the
sentiment seeps through nonetheless in the words we choose to describe
Schiavo's state.
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Although the media has tried endlessly to compare Schiavo's
predicament to that of cancer or Alzheimer's patients whose families choose
to withhold or withdraw life-support at the end of their lives, Schiavo was
not dying at least not until a judge ordered that she not be fed or given
water. She required no machines to help her breathe, no kidney dialysis to
remove toxins from her body, no pacemaker to regulate her heartbeat. She was
even able to swallow on her own she swallowed two liters of saliva every
day, until severe hydration turned her mouth and tongue to dry leather
which raises the possibility that she may not even have required the feeding
tube that the judge ordered removed. Until her court-ordered ordeal, she was
a relatively healthy, if severely brain damaged woman whose longevity alone
was testament to a will to live.
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Those who want to end Terri Schiavo's life have done everything
in their power to dehumanize her. But Terri is not a "vegetable." She is not
"brain dead." She is severely disabled. She cannot care for herself. She
cannot "think" or communicate normally. But she is a person in the clear
meaning of the Constitution, that is unless we have now collectively written
such persons out of the Constitution.
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We have been down this road before when we bought and sold
Africans and their progeny as mere "property" and when our courts determined
that the unborn are not persons unless their mothers choose to carry them to
term. Now we seem on the verge of declaring de facto that the severely
mentally deficient are not persons either. Who will be next the gay man
suffering from AIDS-related dementia, the Alzheimer's patient who cannot
feed herself, the infant with cerebral palsy or spina bifida or
hydrocephalus? Will we suddenly find it convenient even merciful to
let such people starve?
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Rev. Jesse Jackson joined protesters outside Schiavo's hospice
on Tuesday, declaring, "This is one of the profound moral and ethical
breaches of our time. . . we pray for a miracle." It should not take a
miracle to convince the U.S. Supreme Court that an innocent, brain-damaged
woman deserved as much consideration as a convicted rapist and murderer. But
then we live in dark times.
JWR contributor Linda Chavez is President of the Center for Equal Opportunity. Her latest book is "Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics". (Click HERE to purchase. Sales help fund JWR.)
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