The March 31, 2005, court-ordered death of Terri Schiavo was a cultural tipping point. As many readers will recall, the legal case began when Terri’s husband, Michael Schiavo, applied to remove the feeding tube from his profoundly cognitively disabled husband so that he would die of dehydration. When Terri’s parents Bob and Mary Schindler, along with her siblings Bobby and Suzanne, fought the plan in court, important cultural and legal battle lines were drawn that were destined to change the country.
The legal battle raged for several years as the nation agonized and argued about the right and moral path. When his case began, few knew that mentally disabled patients could legally die by having feeding tubes removed. Years later, after Terri’s family (in the disability rights alliance and pro-life organization) failed to save her life, this form of quasi-euthanasia was endorsed by a majority vote.
The general public reception of Terri’s dehydration followed a familiar pattern often seen as the culture-of-death slippery slope slips. At first, most people were surprised.
But as the media beat the drum in support of Michael, attitudes changed. This cultural shift was aided by prominent bioethicists and politicians who assured the public that removing Terri’s feeding tube was not only legal—true—but ethically justified. By the time Terri was left to die agonizingly for two weeks—and despite Terri’s sister saying she had bloodshot eyes—much of the country was convinced that her forced death was right and compassionate
Looking back nearly 20 years later, Terri’s case can be judged as a cultural cudgel that crushed the sanctity of life. These days, society’s primary goal is popularly understood to be the prevention and elimination of suffering—even if that means eliminating the sufferer. In this nihilistic climate, killing—when allegedly motivated by “compassion”—often finds strong public support.
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This change led to radical changes in our laws. When Terri died, Oregon was the only state to legalize assisted suicide. Today, nine jurisdictions have passed laws allowing doctors to prescribe lethal drugs to dying patients (Oregon, Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, Maine, New Jersey, Vermont, California, along with the District of Columbia). These states cover about one-third of the US population.
Not only that, but most of these states have already begun the slippery process of expanding access to assisted suicide beyond what was originally permitted, such as shortened waiting periods, allowing doctors to review assisted suicide requests. of suicide on the Internet rather than in person, and allowing nurse practitioners to prescribe lethal. Vermont has already eliminated its residency requirements—likely to be followed soon by Oregon—opening the door to “suicide tourism” and potentially allowing patients across the country to receive lethal doses that would never have been possible. meets the prescribing doctor in the flesh, or even enters the state.
Meanwhile, the euthanasia movement is working to increase the number of jurisdictions that allow doctors to assist in suicides. This year, there will be intense political battles over assisted suicide legalization in New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, and Maryland, to name a few.
Not content to wait for such changes, euthanasia groups advocate suicide by self-starvation/dehydration in the elderly and disabled, known in movement parlance as VSED (“voluntary cessation of eating and drinking”). VSED is a type of quasi-assisted suicide. Starving oneself is a very painful way to die—as it clearly would have been for Terri Schiavo if she was at all conscious—so a doctor is usually required to relieve the suffering. Otherwise, most people will not be able to complete the process.
Activists are also promoting “VSED by advance directive” for patients to eat and drink voluntarily. The idea was to allow people to create written legally binding documents ordering themselves to starve to death should they become incapacitated. Under these measures, caregivers are required to refuse food to their patients—even if the patient asks for food and water—under the theory that the decision of the previously competent patient should be applied if more also the person to be hungry or not.
How bad will this death agenda be? Canada—our closest cultural cousin—provides an alarming illustration. Our northern neighbor not only allows lethal injection euthanasia, but patients do not have to be terminally ill to qualify. Therefore, sad and frail elderly patients are killed by doctors, as are people with disabilities and chronic illnesses—even the depressed.
Next year, the mentally ill are set to become legally eligible for euthanasia, and the move is also being made to allow children to be killed—perhaps without their parents’ knowledge or consent if deemed doctors that the child is “mature” enough. Not only that, but in Ontario, a person accepted for euthanasia will contact an organ transplant charity and request their liver, heart, pancreas, and kidney.
If the same horrible death paradigm develops here, the Terri Schiavo debacle will be the way to go. In the years since society nodded to the death of a helpless woman from dehydration, we can trace a sharp decline in our commitment to the value of human life, with a concomitant rise in toxic utilitarianism in health care.
Indeed, the day may soon come when killing terminally ill, elderly, and severely disabled patients is not only seen as a legitimate “end-of-life choice,” but a normal way of dying.
LifeNews.com Note: Wesley J. Smith, JD, is a special consultant at the Center for Bioethics and Culture and a bioethics attorney who blogs at Human Exceptionalism.
