The Battle Over Terri Schiavo’s Legacy

O n the eve of the March 31 anniversary of the death of Terri Schiavo—the woman who had been in a “persistent vegetative state” since 1990—the battle over her life, which took place in the courts, in the nation’s capital, and on the streets outside her hospice room, shifted to a battle over her legacy. 

In a New Yorker article about the Bush administration’s protracted war on science, Michael Specter wrote that in 1998, when Michael Schiavo “asked that [Terri’s] feeding tube be removed...a legal war with her parents [was ignited] that eventually turned into a national conflict.” 

After several years of legal wrangling, it came down to the passion-packed month of March 2005 when regular press conferences were held by her parents, Mary and Bob Schindler, and their mostly right-wing political surrogates. Demonstrations and vigils were organized by a cadre of longtime Christian right activists and fundraising pitches were sent by a host of Christian conservative organizations. In addition a well-orchestrated campaign was aimed at vilifying Terri’s husband, Michael. 

With the encouragement of Terri’s parents, religious right activists unleashed a campaign aimed at winning the battle over public opinion. What was a private family matter turned into a media feeding frenzy and a public spectacle. 

For the right wing, the Schiavo case was always bigger than whether Terri lived or died. Speaking frankly at a March 23, 2005 Family Research Council-organized event at the Willard Hotel in Washington, then-Representative Tom DeLay (R-TX) laid out what the Schiavo case meant to the conservative movement: “It is more than just Terri Schiavo. This is a critical issue for people in this position and it is also a critical issue to fight that fight for life, whether it be euthanasia or abortion. I tell you, ladies and gentlemen, one thing God has brought to us is Terri Schiavo to elevate the visibility of what’s going on in America. That Americans would be so barbaric as to pull a feeding tube out of a person that is lucid and starve them to death for two weeks. I mean, in America that’s going to happen if we don’t win this fight.” 

On March 31, 2005, soon after being removed from life support, Terri Schiavo died. On the first anniversary of her death the media paid little attention to the egregious events that had marked the run-up to Terri’s death. 

Governor Jeb Bush passed the anniversary quietly. He had continued attacking Michael Schiavo even after “an autopsy supported” Michael Schiavo’s “contention that she was unaware of her condition and incapable of recovering. Within days Jeb Bush…ordered a state prosecutor to investigate whether Schiavo’s husband had purposely delayed calling an ambulance when she fell ill in 1990.” According to Specter, “Bush produced no evidence and his actions alarmed even his Republican allies,” and “the investigation was quickly dropped.” 

Also on the first anniversary the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) didn’t remind the public of the senator’s keen ability to diagnose Schiavo’s condition by viewing a video of her in her hospital room. 

The beleaguered and indicted former House Majority Leader and now former Congressperson Tom DeLay, obviously too busy dealing with his own troubles, also didn’t reiterate last year’s threats of retribution against judges. 

Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist and Schiavo family spokesperson, who was one of the people expected to mobilize support for Schiavo among conservative Christians, was nowhere to be seen. 

While the Schiavo Case is in several races in Florida this year, the Christian Post reported that, “Unlike last year, when Congress, President Bush, and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush pressed to keep Schiavo alive, only one lawmaker was on hand…with the Schindlers [at a Washington, DC press conference], Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan.” 

Following The Money 

I n his book Using Terri: The Religious Right’s Conspiracy to Take Away Our Rights (HarperCollins, 2005), Jon Eisenberg, an attorney working pro bono for Michael Schiavo, wrote that the case was a key battle in the religious right’s culture wars, which are being fought on “multiple fronts,” including “pushing for prayer and creationism in the public schools, opposing stem-cell research, women’s reproductive rights, and gay civil unions and marriage.” 

Eisenberg found himself wondering, “Who was funding the Schindlers’ advocates.” After visiting the Media Transparency website, Eisenberg identified a “threetiered structure” that included “seven foundations...fourteen think tanks and other religious Right organizations...and eighteen foot soldiers” behind the case. The “foot soldiers” included: 

• David Gibbs III and Barbara Weller, attorneys with the Gibbs Law Firm; Gibbs, whose family controls the Christian Law Association, started working on the case in 2003 and became lead attorney for the Schindlers in September 2004 
• Pat Anderson, the Schindler’s attorney before September 2004 
• Robert Destro, a law professor at Washington, DC’s Catholic University of America and “principal investigator for the antigay” Marriage Law Project, who represented Jeb Bush “in litigation arising from the passage of ‘Terri’s Law’ in 2003, and joined...Gibbs III in representing the Schindlers in 2005” 
• Jay Sekulow, chief counsel for the Pat Robertson-founded American Center for Law and Justice, who was one of the Schindler’s attorneys 
• Deborah Berliner and Brett Wood, “formally affiliated with ...Judicial Watch” 
• Wesley J. Smith, “the anti-euthanasia activist,” a “behindthe-scenes ‘informal advisor’ to the Schindlers” 
• Rita Marker, executive director of the anti-euthanasia International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide 
• Kenneth Connor, former head of the Washington, DC-based Family Research Council, who worked on “Terri’s Law” 
• William Saunders and Jon Halisky, lawyers for the FRC’s Center for Human Life and Bioethics 
• Max Lapertosa, Kenneth Walden, and Geoge Rahdert, disability rights lawyers 
• Former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX), who spearheaded
  congressional intervention  
• Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), who “sponsored a version of the congressional bill that threw the Schiavo case into the federal courts 
• Governor Jeb Bush (R-FL) 

The “officer corp” included: the Alliance Defense Fund, Family Research Council, American Center for Law and Justice, Life Legal Defense Fund, National Right to Life Committee, Christian Law Association, Discovery Institute for Public Policy, Encounter Books, International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, National Organization on Disability, World Institute on Disability, Judicial Watch, Values Action Team, and the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying group founded by two former aides to DeLay. 

Foundations involved included: the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, Scaife family foundations, Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, Randolph Foundation, JM Foundation, Koch family foundations, and the Heritage Foundation. 

“In some instances,” Eisenberg wrote, “I was able to trace payments directly to a foot soldier.... In other instances, I discovered broader financial connections where there was a constant flow of money to the foot soldiers, not discernibly earmarked for the Schiavo case in particular, but generally financing the foot soldiers’ work in the trenches of the culture wars, thus facilitating their work in the Schiavo battle.” 

Against Patients’ Rights 

O n March 28 a joint press release from the Merger Watch Project and Compassion & Choice, two organizations “dedicated to protecting patients’ right to self-determination,” warned that between the beginning of 2005 and mid-February 2006, 49 pieces of legislation had been introduced in 23 states that “would make honoring patients’ wishes to forego life-sustaining treatment more difficult.” 

According to the groups’ research team, of the bills thus far proposed, 40 “would restrict forgoing artificially administered nutrition and hydration”; 20 bills in 13 states “are based on the National Right to Life Committee [NRLC] model legislation entitled “Starvation and Dehydration of Persons with Disabilities Prevention Act”; and 14 contain “restrictions beyond” the NRLC model bill. 

“This legislative push in the states demonstrates that some conservative religious leaders and politicians do not plan to stop with the Terri Schiavo case,” said Lois Uttley, director of the Merger Watch Project. “They are trying to interfere with private medical decisions that should be made by patients and their families, based on sound medical advice and patients’ own religious and moral values.” 

Still Using Schiavo 

A s the one-year anniversary approached, RightMarch.com was hell-bent on defying science, common sense, and public opinion. It also got a head start on mining the marketing possibilities. In a communiqué from William Greene, the president of RightMarch.com, the organization claimed that: “Contrary to anything you may have heard, Terri was NOT brain dead; Terri was NOT in a coma; she was NOT in a ‘persistent vegetative state’; nor was she on ANY life-support system. 

“Terri laughed, Terri cried, she moved, and she made child-like attempts at speech with her family. Sometimes she would say ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’ or ‘yeah’ when they asked her a question. When her mother or father kissed her hello or goodbye, she would look at them and ‘pucker up’ her lips.” 

Michael Schiavo was accused of everything from failing to provide her with the necessary physical therapy to exacerbating her condition to wanting her dead for financial reasons. According to the RightMarch.com e-Alert: “Now Michael Schiavo, Terri’s estranged husband who denied her any therapy for over a decade and then collaborated with those activist judges and legislators to starve her to death, has stepped into the media spotlight once again. He’s started a PAC (political action committee) to exploit Terri’s name and raise money to defeat the Congressmen and Senators who tried to save her life.” In addition to inaccurately rewriting history, these claims were aimed at blunting the launch of Schiavo’s TerriPAC, which “is committed to educating the public about the social and political issues surrounding the case of Terri Schiavo,” said Derek Newton, TerriPAC director.  

“This isn’t about vengeance, it’s about holding people accountable for what they did,” Michael Schiavo told Keith Olbermann in an interview on MSNBC’s “Countdown” on March 27. “These politicians…walked into our lives and tried to take it over,” Schiavo said. 

Schiavo’s “Countdown” appearance was also aimed at publicizing his book Terri: The Truth (written with Michael Hirsh). According to the book, the right wing-orchestrated campaign that vilified Schiavo led to a $250,000 bounty placed on his head “urging that I be tortured before I’m killed. I was condemned by the president of the United States, the majority leaders of the House and Senate, the governor of Florida, the Pope, Jesse Jackson, and the right-wing media,” Schiavo wrote. 

The other book released before the anniversary is called A Life That Matters: The Legacy of Terri Schiavo: A Lesson For Us All, written by Bob and Mary Schindler, their son Bobby, and their daughter Suzanne Schindler Vitadamo.  

According to London’s Telegraph newspaper, the Schindler book “recount[s] their failed legal struggle to keep the brain-damaged woman alive against the wishes of her husband and presenting accounts of his alleged violent temper.” It also places Michael Schiavo as the chief villain in the case; Reuters reported that “the Schindlers again accuse [him] of abusing Terri.”  

While national politicians have essentially chosen not to replay last year, conservative right-to-lifers have every intention of intruding in the lives of people as they face difficult and personal family decisions, by pushing restrictive legislation in their states.