By: Michael Land
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Right-to-live advocates and right-to-die activists have traditionally been political enemies. While organizations such as the Death with Dignity National Center lobby to craft laws enabling patients to end their own lives, the movement to legalize euthanasia and physician-assisted dying is still opposed by pro-life organizations and religious groups such as the Catholic Church. In addition to the battle over whether or not someone can choose to end his or her own life, there is also disagreement over whether or not it is justifiable to withdraw life support from a patient in a persistent vegetative state. In 1976,this right was established at a federal level,and ever since then, controversial cases revolving around the conflict between the perceived sanctity of life and the belief in bodily autonomy have continued to plague the American legal system.
The Terri Schiavo case was one of the first major court cases to pit the right-to-live movement against right-to-die advocates. In 1990, Theresa “Terri” Schiavo suffered massive brain damage from sudden cardiac arrest. After she spent months in a coma and then eight years in a persistent vegetative state, her husband filed a petition to remove her feeding tube. The ensuing case became a proxy war between the differing ideologies. Mr. Schiavo’s lawyer framed the case as a desire “to provide for Terri a peaceful death with dignity.” The Vatican lambasted the final decision, calling it “a violation of the sacred nature of life.”
The controversial case spanned seven years and involved five suits in district courts, no less than 14 appeals within the state court system, and federal legislation designed to keep Terri Schiavo alive. This act, known as the Palm Sunday Compromise, granted federal courts jurisdiction to review the Schiavo case without regard to previous state court rulings. The controversial law drew the ire of civil liberties groups who viewed the act as an overreach of congressional authority and a violation of the separation of powers. However, conservative groups who felt that any intervention was justified if it would keep Terri alive supported it. The law proved to be ineffective; after four denials of certiorari from the Supreme Court, Terri Schiavo was removed from life support. She died two weeks later.
In 2013, this same moral dilemma resurfaced with the case of Marlise Muñoz in Texas. The 33-year old paramedic collapsed in her home and was declared brain dead two days later on Nov. 28. At the time she was 14 weeks pregnant with her second child.
Marlise’s husband attempted to honor her end-of-life wishes by removing her from life support, but the hospital refused to comply, citing a Texas law prohibiting the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment from a pregnant patient. Nearly two months after her hospitalization, a judge ruled that the law did not apply to brain-dead patients, and allowed her to be disconnected from life support.
The case sparked a firestorm of political activism. Many pro-life groups advocated for the extension of life support, and some passionate activists offered to adopt the baby. Troy Newman, a spokesman for the pro-life organization Operation Rescue, made the following statement after Mrs. Muñoz was removed from life support: “We are not medical professionals, but we do understand that a dead corpse cannot sustain a growing pregnancy for two months, as Mrs. Muñoz did. The law was clear that life support should have been continued in order to give the child a chance, but the intent of that law was completely ignored.”
Erick Muñoz told reporters that the family agreed on the best course of action, and that he had spoken with his wife about her wishes should such a situation ever arise. He accused conservative lawmakers of using his wife’s case as a vote-grabbing scheme, implying that they were acting out of concern for their political well-being rather than concern for his family. “I can’t take the right away from you to do something with your loved ones. I don’t feel they should, either,” Mr. Muñoz said. “I feel they’re using my wife, unfortunately, as a stepping stone, as an argument for their debates. They want votes. And I tell them, ‘That’s wrong.’ … They are using her as a political argument.”
In a statement, lawyers for the family claimed “there are further abnormalities… that cannot be specifically determined due to the immobile nature of Mrs. Munoz’s deceased body. Quite sadly, this information is not surprising due to the fact that the fetus, after being deprived of oxygen for an indeterminate length of time, is gestating within a dead and deteriorating body, as a horrified family looks on in absolute anguish, distress and sadness.”
These painful cases could have been avoided with clear federal legislation on end-of-life issues. A patient’s advance directive or expressed wishes to refuse life-sustaining treatment should be considered inviolable. In 1978, the courts ruled that forcing a patient to undergo an unwanted medical procedure, even if refusal was considered morally reprehensible, “would defeat the sanctity of the individual and would impose a rule which would know no limits, and one could not imagine where the line would be drawn.” Keeping an unwilling patient on life support should certainly be viewed with the same skepticism.
It is not within the purview of governmental powers to foster a “culture of life” regardless of the wishes of individuals, and it is a fundamental right to decide the fate of one’s own body. Prominent bioethicist Jacob Appel argues in favor of legalizing assisted suicide, even for those who are not terminally ill or in a vegetative state. According to Dr. Appel, “Personal autonomy has long served as the core principal of both American medical ethics and liberal democracy. Individual choice should not yield to societal preference simply because the question is no longer how to live, but how to die.” Without clear laws establishing that people have the right to live (and die) according to their own wishes, cases in which human lives are relegated to the role of political pawns and in which needless suffering is imposed upon others for the sake of promoting a specific view of morality will continue to arise.