For 13 crazed days, America could not turn on the TV, read a newspaper or walk outside without being affronted with the news that Terri Schiavo was lying in a hospice in Florida without her feeding tube. Conversations at the proverbial water cooler occurred everywhere. Everyone wanted to know what everyone else thought about the situation.
The Terri Schiavo case may have ended early yesterday, with the country unevenly divided on the outcome, but the issue still remains. Should the feeding tube have been removed or replaced? And who had the right to make that decision?
Some sided with her husband; others sided with the family. Each side has its own reasons, but I don’t know if all of those reasons were exactly justifiable.
Was the husband just trying to “kill her off” in order to marry his girlfriend? Some believe so.
Yet, the courts repeatedly did not find any valid reason to call her husband’s judgment into question.
Were so many politicians using this as a means to rally support for next year’s elections? Some say this is true, as well.
The fact that the federal government stepped in to intervene on behalf of Terri’s family was scary enough. In such a delicate manner, one that should have been private, Congress and President Bush overstepped their bounds. Whatever their reasons, the inhabitants of Capitol Hill were wrong.
Did the press even care, or were the just interested in finding the next “hot-button issue?” Do you even have to ask yourself that question?
The media, while it has the right to choose which stories to publish, also went overboard. By constantly publicizing the every move and wink of Terri, they helped to create a frenzy, one that involved the American public sticking its nose in a very personal matter.
The cries and screams over the past two weeks have been harsh, at best. One side said it was inhumane to remove the tube. The other side claimed it was inhumane to not follow her wishes. We all heard and read the stories.
The president was quoted saying in these decisions we must err on the side of life. But what life was it for Terri? And is it the president of our country who can make that decision?
I look at the doctors that cared for her for so many years, as well as the court appointed doctors. Despite being able to breathe without assistance, they agreed she was brain dead. Therefore, the feeding tube that caused so much controversy was her means of life support.
So many Americans are faced with the decision to turn off life support for their loved ones. And despite the difficulty they make a choice. Alone. Without the interference of a nation polarized recently on every political viewpoint imaginable.
Where was the media when someone turned off her husband’s ventilator? What kind of protection did Congress offer the young girl whose parents had the machines turned off? Why was this case so special? Politics? Religious convictions? Human sympathy?
This was, and still is, an issue surrounded with questions. No one wanted Terri to suffer anymore, yet everyone had an opinion as to what was best for her. For some reason the president, Congress and the American public mistakenly thought they had the absolute right to decide the fate of a woman who had been lying in a hospice for 15 years.
The only clear inhumane act here was when the feeding tube was removed and replaced twice. Giving false hope to the family, putting her husband through the emotional wringer, making a brain-dead woman spend her last days on Earth surrounded by protestors- that’s inhumane to me.
Granting her wishes not not be kept alive on life support, according to her husband and backed by the court system, seems like the humane thing here.
But yet there’s still the million-dollar question. Was the decision to remove the feeding tube the right one?
Truth is, it doesn’t matter what we think. The law explicitly noticed her husband as the one who must make that decision. He alone must bear the responsibility. It’s none of our business what and why he decided what he did.
It never was.
Dustin Barnes is a senior communication major. He can be reached at [email protected].