Jackson, Nader, Disability Activists Were Wrong On Schiavo Case

[Itsthetruth]

CounterPunch
April 7, 2005

A Right to Health Care and a Right to Die
Tug of War with Terri Schiavo
By ALAN MAASS

All kinds of right-wing fanatics--anti-abortionists, "family values" blowhards, even neo-Nazi Bo Gritz--flocked to exploit the Terri Schiavo case. Their hypocrisy knew no bounds.

But in the days before Schiavo's death last week, some of the biggest news was made by people who consider themselves progressives. Rev. Jesse Jackson flew to Florida to pray with Terri Schiavo's parents, who wanted to keep their daughter attached to a feeding tube, and Ralph Nader wrote an article urging the courts to grant guardianship to the parents. Numerous advocates and activists for disabled rights showed up in the same ranks--many insisting that Michael Schiavo's decision to have his wife's feeding tube removed represented a wider threat of euthanasia against the disabled.

Progressives should be opposed to measures that give the government more powers to interfere with the personal choices of individual people. It doesn't take much imagination to see how the logic of "Terri's law" is connected to, for example, further restrictions on young women who want an abortion. And lawmakers are considering more far-reaching legislation modeled on "Terri's law"--with none other than liberal Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) pushing for its consideration, at the urging, he says, of disability rights groups.

ONE SYMPTOM of the confusion around the Schiavo case is that people who should know better accepted wholesale the right wing's ideologically loaded characterization of Terri Schiavo's condition as "disabled," with the possibilities of a recovery unknown. "Since when do we believe the doctors?" asked one writer on the Common Dreams Web site. "I thought we leftists were skeptical, even scornful, of the authority of mainstream medicine."

But this view is "scornful" of basic science. Every court-appointed doctor who examined Schiavo agreed that she was in a persistent vegetative state--also known, more bluntly, as "cortical death"--the result of a massive heart attack in 1990 that deprived her brain of oxygen.



http://www.counterpunch.org/maass04072005.html

[Itsthetruth]

1. Liberals In Congress Were Also Wrong

And so were liberal members of Congress like Senator Harkin who voted for the emergency legislation signed by George Bush and those who refused to speak out against that law.