Having only heard of Terri Schiavo five minutes ago, a surprising number of her "supporters" have found themselves able to not only declare that her husband (who appears to have provided more care for her than any other individual, and never stopped visiting her) is wrong, but to declare him a murderer, a liar and a Nazi.
Most notably, a claim that a scan found evidence of broken bones has swelled into a theory that Michael Schiavo beat his wife - and even, incredibly, that her death was the result of murder, rather than the heart attack deduced by doctors. And it's not just the Republican "base" loonies at the Free Republic, but people who can actually get things published in newspapers.
There's a small problem with this theory: no proof. No one has ever even brought these claims to court. Indeed, as part of this long, long process, a guardian was appointed by the Florida governor to specifically investigate this theory. His conclusion was that there was no credibility to the claim and that Michael Schiavo was a caring guardian.
So what then, to make of the fact that a man has now been arrested for "soliciting the murder" not only of Michael Schiavo but of a Florida judge who found in his favour? This goon couldn't even spell Terri Schiavo's name properly.
This New York Times comment seeks to explain the philosophical divide in attitudes to the case, all the way back to the Enlightenment.
I guess I'm on the Enlightenment side here. The medical evidence seems emphatic that the part of Terri Schiavo's brain that is "her" - the cerebral cortex - has mostly liquefied. Her brain shows no electrical activity on an EEG. The idea that, after 15 years, some additional form of "rehabilitation" might be employed to bring her back seems fanciful. Her body might be breathing, but in a very real sense she is simply not there. Instapundit linked to some useful statements on this, and even he concedes that "many on the right have succumbed to hysteria here." Dare I say "War on Expertise" again?
The expert medical evidence also holds that she will not suffer pain or distress after being disconnected from the feeding machine. (It's interesting to speculate as to whether if it had been another device sustaining her - say, a dialysis machine - the response would have been the same.) I'm listening to a woman called Kate Adamson talk to Linda Clark: she recovered after being declared in a "persistent vegetative state" and actually having her feeding tube removed, but the cases don't seem to bear detailed comparison.
Adamson was in a coma after a stroke, not incapacitated by critical brain damage. And she was able to communicate, by blinking - she passed the kind of test that Terri Schiavo "failed" - and I cannot see any way that she could have registered a flat EEG, had one been taken. I can see why advocates for the disabled would take up the Schiavo case, but it seems a poor one from which to draw general principles.
A beneficial impact of the case is that Americans now seem to be rushing to swear "living wills" to avoid just such an unhappy situation. It does not appear that any of them are requiring that they be kept alive in such circumstances, but the reverse. The Christian Science Monitor interviewed a group of Florida senior citizens who were very much of a do-not-resuscitate mind.
I had a couple of reader responses to Craig Ranapia's question on living wills. Emma said:
I work as an admin for an online writing site, with Canadian, British, and US co-workers. The Shiavo case has been a big issue this week just in informal discussion. As a result, both my Canadian boss and I have downloaded kits for making 'living wills', specifically to ensure that, should something this awful happen to us, our partners will not have to go through this hell. It's really the only good thing to have come out of the whole revolting mess, I've seen a hugely increased awareness of the importance of getting your wishes written down. We've all talked about it with our partners at some point, but they need something to back them up, even if it's not legally binding, which a living will isn't.
Also, another of my co-workers, a devout Christian Republican from Seattle, had to comply with her mother's wishes just two months ago and withdraw life support. Seeing the TV coverage of the Shiavo case has been enormously distressing for her.
Ben Gracewood said:
We've never written anything down on paper, but it's something that comes up in discussion every once in a while - usually resulting from something like this current case.
The general sentiment between myself and my partner is if one or the other is totally incapacitated (coma, brain damage) for more than a couple of months, then it's time to move on - whether that requires a hospice, or pulling the plug.
Same goes for organ donation. Despite her qualms, I've basically demanded that my bits go to the most needy person(s) in the queue in the event that I no longer require them.
A couple of people queried my comment last week that the "futile care" law signed by Bush as governor of Texas was used to withdraw care from a six month old boy against the wishes of his mother, "who could not afford to arrange other care for him." That's what it adds up to. This is the relevant part:
If the patient or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the patient is requesting life-sustaining treatment that the attending physician has decided and the review process has affirmed is inappropriate treatment, the patient shall be given available life-sustaining treatment pending transfer under Subsection (d). The patient is responsible for any costs incurred in transferring the patient to another facility. The physician and the health care facility are not obligated to provide life-sustaining treatment after the 10th day after the written decision required under Subsection (b) is provided to the patient or the person responsible for the health care decisions of the patient …
If you can't pay, and especially if you're on Medicaid, it's over. The part I did get wrong, and changed when I realised it, was saying that this was a historical case. It actually only happened a few days ago. Indeed, such cases have gone on around the Schiavo case the whole time. For some reason, they don't attract angry crowds.
The Lion and the Donkey blog listed what its author considered the most significant hypocrisies in the general Republican Party stance on Schiavo. Quite interesting.
Chris Banks has part two of his investigation of the Jim Peron allegations online. He concludes that "from what we now know, Jim Peron is at worst guilty of holding and advocating some extremely dodgy political beliefs at a certain time and place, something that all our sources acknowledge is his only tangible ‘crime'."
I'd add a caveat even to that. Anyone who starts digging into libertarian feuding here or in the US will soon find that these people will say anything about each other. The ability of people to who lay claim to a towering high-mindedness to stoop so low tends to bear out a view of doctrinaire Randianism as a form of arrested adolescence.
And apart from anything else, Eric Garris (the former owner of the bookstore Peron bought in San Francisco in the 1980s) may not be a sound witness when it comes to Peron. Here is the Google cache of an old posting about Garris and his friend Justin Raimondo from the Reason forums (the original has, intriguingly, been removed since this business blew up). It claims that Garris and Raimondo set out to "destroy" Peron after a business dispute.
And, to conclude on a lighter note, I've been doing some BitTorrenting lately. I watched the leaked first episode of the new Doctor Who. Verdict: Excellent! And also the first episode of the American version of The Office. Verdict: Oh dear …