“Fail to see any harm”? What?!?.
Reading the dissent in today's Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruling
on the Schiavo case, I think I found the words to explain what's so
offensive to me about the actions of Congress and Schiavo's parents to
date. The following quote, from the dissenting judge's reasoning on why
a preliminary injunction forcing the resumption of feeds would be
approriate, is what gave me focus (emphasis mine):
In fact, I fail to see any harm in reinstating the feeding tube. On the other hand, a denial of the request for injunction will result in the death of Theresa Schiavo.
The Florida courts went through an excruciatingly detailed process
to determine what Terri Schiavo herself would have felt was harmful,
and ruled that there is clear and convincing evidence
that she would feel it harmful to be artifically supported in any
manner. And as a result, replacing her feeding tube would be the very
definition of harmful, for the very reason that it would
prolong her life. I guess what I wonder is if the presence of a living
will specifically forbidding the continuation of artificial sustenance
would have changed the dissenting judge's opinion on the harm of
replacing the tube. Put another way: can the judge truly ignore what
has been determined to be Schiavo's ideas of benefit and harm and then substitute his own in order to decide how to proceed?
Extended more broadly, that's exactly what all the supporters of the
Congressional bill did — used their own views (or, says the skeptical
side of me, the views of the various groups that support them) about
good and bad, benefit and harm, moral and immoral, and then imposed
those views on Terri Schiavo and the country. In the end, that idea
that the views of someone other than me matter at all when I'm hooked up to life-sustaining equipment is what's so frightening. [Q Daily News]