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Michael is the widower of Theresa Marie Schindler “Terri”
Schiavo, who died on March 31, 2005, after being judicially
executed—as her husband wanted.
She had collapsed on February 25, 1990, having
experienced a heart attack that caused respiratory and cardiac
arrest, which resulted in extensive brain damage. She was diagnosed
by several doctors to be in PVS—persistent vegetative state. She
was placed in—and brought out of—several hospitals for 15 years.
In 1998, Michael, her husband and guardian,
petitioned a Florida Court to remove her feeding tube. Robert and
Mary Schindler, her parents, opposed the petition. They claimed that
she was conscious and responded to their cooing and kissing. They
saw her pucker her lips to kiss them back and could see that she was
attempting to speak to them.
The court, placing itself in Terri’s place,
ruled that if she could only speak she would tell everyone that she
did not want to be kept alive. For seven years the legal
controversy—between Michael and Terri’s parents—became an
international affair. Politicians, expert doctors, pro-life and
disabled-persons’ advocates debated with pro-euthanasia advocates,
sometimes appearing on CNN, BBC and other globally shown TV
programs.
Would you have petitioned the court to shut off
her life-support system as Michael Schiavo did?
I wouldn’t.
Eulana Englaro of Milan
Something like the Terri Schindler Schiavo case
is now rocking Italy.
This time it’s the father of a Milanese
37-year-old woman, Eulana Englaro, who asked the court for
authorization to kill his daughter by removing her feeding tube. His
request was granted.
Eulana has been in a coma, the result of a car
collision, since 1992. She was 16. Her skull was smashed, her neck
broken. Doctors thought she would soon be dead but she was breathing
on her own less than three months later.
Italian bioethical and medical associations have
criticized the Milan court’s decision. They call the decision a
positive act of euthanasia and not merely one to stop an unnecessary
and disproportionate treatment to keep her artificially alive.
Eulana will suffer a long and painful
death—unless her death is hastened by large doses of morphine,
which would then be even more active euthanasia.
The Scienza e Vita (Science and Life)
association bitterly criticized the court for deciding to legitimize
the killing of a human being by “depriving her of the most
elemental things: nourishment and hydration.” It described the
case as one in which “the community of healthy people has decided
to stop taking care of a human being in a state of the greatest
frailty and dependence, condemning her to an atrocious death by
hunger and thirst.”
Scienza e Vita worries that the Milan court has
set a legal precedent that will start a wave of petitions from
relatives tired of caring for their former loved ones whom they now
want to die because they have become helpless.
The Vatican paper L’Osservatore Romano
published an article by Adriano Pessina, director of the Bioethics
Athenaeum of the Sacro Cuore (Sacred Heart) Catholic University. He
writes that “an ordinary treatment [nourishment and hydration] is
being suspended following a court decision that has no clinical
basis.”
The decision, Pessina explains, was based on the
alleged desire of Eulana not to live in these circumstances and the
alleged power of life and death in the hands of her father and
guardian. But by Italian law, the Bioethics Athenaeum director
writes, the “biological last will and testament” does not exist.
So the court was forced to construct a case to indirectly prove its
relevance.
As to the perceived power of a guardian to
decide on the life and death of a ward, Pessina writes that the
existence of that power is debatable. In fact a guardian’s duty is
to act in the best interest of the person entrusted to him.
“Decisions on a person’s life should be limited, and every
citizen should be guaranteed that the value of his life will not be
determined by a particular anthropological idea,” the Bioethics
expert states.
Pessina further writes: “It isn’t necessary
to take recourse to a religious concept of life, or to deny the
legal and moral possibility of rejecting disproportionate treatments
to dissent from this decision: Suffice it to stress that, in
Eulana’s case, imposed in fact is the interruption of a long
process of care, made up of attention, loving dedication and respect
for her personal dignity, which the protagonists of the appeal
themselves have always recognized.”
“The subject of consciousness is very delicate
to address,” he adds. “However, if Eulana is truly not conscious
of herself, then she doesn’t suffer, and it is hard to understand
why the state must condemn her to death—unless it is because of an
obstinate ideological plan of a state that calls itself lay and
should be methodologically foreign to all religious confessions.”
Doctors have observed that Eulana has not been
certified to be brain dead. They say it is incorrect to diagnose
that she is, like Terri Schiavo, in “persistent or permanent
vegetative state” because it has not been proven.
rqb@manilatimes.net
rq_bas@yahoo.com
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