The Terri Schiavo Case
By James R. Fuller, Senior Pastor
Calder Baptist Church, Beaumont, TX

Over two years ago, I listened intently as the neurologist met with my 54-year-old brother’s family three days after the sudden heart attack that left him unconscious and on a ventilator. Our pain compounded as the doctor said to his children, “Your dad will not recover. He has no higher brain functioning. He has no response to pain stimuli. There is no hope.” His sons left the room and returned in about twenty minutes. “We’ve decided to remove dad from the ventilator and donate his organs. We know that is what he would want us to do.”

When the day arrived, several of us sat with my brother, Thomas, after the vent was removed. Compassionate doctors and nurses had moved him from ICU to a single room for our privacy. We held his hand, stroked his face, and listened to his labored breathing. He made no response to us, but the lower brain functioning continued to direct his autonomic systems of breathing and circulation. Six hours later, his body relaxed and released him from his struggle. He died with dignity.

How grateful I am that compassionate doctors and nurses in a local hospital in Duluth, Georgia, allowed our family to make the decision that Thomas would have wanted. Make no mistake about what you have read and seen concerning the Terri Schiavo case. At issue for all of us is the right of families to fulfill the wishes of their loved ones in the manner of our dying.

The Schiavo case became an illustration of evil forces in our culture that are pushing for the state to make decisions that properly belong in the hands of families. It is not suffocating a person for a ventilator to be disconnected and the natural process of dying respected. It is not starving a person for a feeding tube to be withdrawn and for allowing a person to die with dignity. Our physical bodies are not designed to live forever, although medical science can now artificially prolong life for years after the body’s own mechanisms for such functioning have failed.

The state should enact proper, broad parameters to make sure that no one’s death is hastened when there is hope for meaningful life to continue, but the State has no business abrogating the proper responsibility of families to fulfill the wishes of their loved ones to die with dignity. The Religious Right wants to make families doubt that dying is a part of living. They use fear and guilt to drive their agenda, which is political, not religious. Politicians, judges, and religious extremists have no right to intrude into this most intimate part of life.

The circus that became the dying of Terri Schiavo powerfully demonstrates the wisdom of judges who refused to intervene. May their tribe, and their courage, increase.

Updated Saturday, April 30, 2005