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Annihilating Terri Schiavo
- Abstract
During the tumultuous final weeks in the life of Terri Schiavo, the young woman who died in a Florida hospice in April, press reports in the nation’s media typically focused on the bitter conflicts among members of her family over her treatment, disagreements among consultants over her state of consciousness, and the increasingly intense arguments in legislatures and the courts over her guardianship. Since her death, the case and the story of her death and dying have been mined for their bearing on our ongoing culture wars and for the debate over the place of “values” in our politics. In particular, the seeming failure of the Republican leadership to rally legislative support in favor of keeping her alive has been seized upon as evidence of the Right’s overreaching, and as a lesson in the ironies of ideology. In the words of a writer in the New York Times Magazine, “the heirs to Goldwater and Reagan seemed to forget how they came to control the values debate in America in the first place: not by interfering in the moral choices of families but by promising to stop government from doing exactly that.”
Many a hidden assumption lurks in that statement, not least concerning the (assumed) wishes of the dying woman herself. It is worth reminding ourselves, moreover, that she succumbed in the end by being deprived of food and water by order of the courts—which is to say, by order of government. But in what follows I want to concentrate on another, neglected aspect of this entire dismal episode.
About the Author
Paul McHugh is University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. His The Mind Has Mountains, a book of essays including a number that appeared originally in COMMENTARY, appeared in 2005.
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