Do you know that Terri's husband has refused for all these years to let her have any kind of rehabilitation therapy?
I believe that's not true. If anything, it seems that Michael Schiavo has been needlessly vilified by those who do not know him. I posted a relevant article about the husband at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050321/005897.html>, as the same question came up there also.
At 8:13 AM -0800 3/25/05, adrienne lauby wrote:
Did you also know that Terri's case has also been taken up by the disability organization, "Not Dead Yet"? They see her husband's willingness to kill her as a dangerous precedent for killing disabled people because someone else thinks someone's quality of life is not "something I would want to live with."
I'm aware of this, but read Andrew Batavia's article "Disability and Physician-Assisted Suicide" (New England Journal of Medicine 336.23 (June 5, 1997):1671-1673), which I also posted to LBO-talk: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20050321/005899.html>. Batavia was a well known advocate for disability rights who helped to write the Americans with Disabilities Act, and his article shows that a majority of the disabled may not actually hold the position on physician assisted suicide and other issues advanced by Not Dead Yet.
In any event, Congressional and state executive interventions have been tailored to address Terri Schiavo and her only, so, even if she were made to live by Jeb Bush, reinserting a feeding tube into her body won't strengthen any other person's right to health care, nutrition, etc., but the decision strengthening the powers of the executive and legislative branches at the expense of courts may have large negative implications for the disabled as well as the able-bodied. Elaine Cassell explains the case's legal significance in her article "The Terri Schiavo Case: Congress Rushes In Where Only Courts Should Tread" (at <http://writ.news.findlaw.com/cassel/20050324.html>). The most important part is this: "It is a fundamental principle that Congress cannot simply overrule court decisions it does not like -- except in the very limited case in which it can amend federal statutes in a case that turns on statutory interpretation. But here, Congress tried to rewrite--or rather, invalidate--prior judicial rulings that were the law of Terri's case, violating the bedrock principle of the separation of powers among three co-equal branches of government." Fortunately, the federal district and appeals court and the Supreme Court didn't agree with Congress, but if they had, implications for Americans, including disabled Americans, would likely have been, on balance, negative at least in the short term, given the Right's current domination of the White House and Congress. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
