Life and death politics
The Schiavo case is just the latest front in a much nastier war
It is an American tragedy for the modern media age--litigious, polarizing, personal, political, and televised round-the-clock. After remaining frozen for 15 years, the saga of Terri Schiavo saw a lightning-quick succession of twists and turns last week before arriving at what is likely a short and sad final chapter. Just past midnight last Monday--three days after a feeding tube had been removed on orders from a Florida judge--Congress passed legislation crafted just for Schiavo, and President Bush climbed out of bed in his pajamas to sign it. The law allowed federal courts to lift Schiavo's case out of Florida, where more than a dozen judges have ruled in favor of Schiavo's husband, Michael, who says she is in a persistent vegetative state and would want to die, and against her parents, who reject that diagnosis and say she would want to live. But by midweek, her parents' campaign to reinsert Schiavo's feeding tube was unraveling. The Florida Senate defeated a bill to outlaw withholding food or water from patients without written instructions. The case bounced from state to federal courts and back again, while the Supreme Court, for at least the fifth time, declined to weigh in. State courts blocked Florida Gov. Jeb Bush's attempt to claim custody of Schiavo, and he declined calls from Christian groups to intervene anyway.
"Sanctity of life." While most Americans were only marginally aware of the Schiavo story until recently, religious conservatives have embraced the case as part of a broader movement to protect what they call the "sanctity of life." For many evangelicals and Roman Catholics, the religious right's two big constituencies, Schiavo is "a powerful symbol for what's wrong with this country," says University of Akron political science Prof. John Green, "which is that it doesn't respect life." Many social conservatives consider the fight to keep Schiavo alive an extension of the antiabortion stance, around which the modern Christian right formed in the 1970s. "The effort to reinstate Terri's feeding tube and the pro-life position stem from the same ethic," says Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. ". . . All human life is of value, regardless of the human's stage of development, level of health, or ability."
For social conservatives, the embrace of Schiavo fits a broader strategy of incremental changes: initiatives like the push for the recent passage of legislation banning the procedure opponents call "partial-birth" abortion. "We've wanted to dramatize the morality of end-of-life issues for some time," says Richard Cizik, chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, whose organization claims 30 million members. Schiavo provided a human face for promoting a "sanctity of life" over a "quality of life" approach to death and dying, says Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
While evangelicals received much attention in the aftermath of last November's election--when they accounted for 1 in 3 votes for Bush--the campaign to keep Schiavo alive has also highlighted the role of conservative Catholics in the Christian right. Bush won the Catholic vote last year after losing it in 2000, and his "culture of life" formulation, widely embraced by evangelicals, stems from a 1995 papal encyclical. Though evangelicals generally support the death penalty, which the Vatican opposes, "we find common cause where we can," says Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of pro-life activities at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "I'm sure," he adds, "that what the pope has said about capital punishment is also taken very seriously by evangelicals."
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