Obama regrets a vote for life
Today is the third anniversary of the death by starvation and dehydration of Terri Schindler Schiavo. In the final two weeks or her long ordeal, when the appeals courts failed to uphold her rights to due process, Congress intervened to establish that we are a nation of laws that are in place to protect individual rights. Sen. Barack Obama was one of the senators who favored Terri’s rights and her family’s. Now he wishes he could take it back.
Nat Henthoff has the details.
In none of the endless presidential candidates’ debates has there been a meaningful discussion of the rights of disabled Americans. However, in the Feb. 26 debate in Cleveland, Barack Obama casually and ignorantly revealed his misunderstanding of the basic issue in the highly visible and still-resonating official death sentence of a disabled woman, Terri Schiavo. I have repeatedly called her death the result of “the longest public execution in American history.”
When moderator Tim Russert asked Hillary Clinton and Obama if “there are any words or votes that you’d like to take back … in your careers in public service,” Obama answered that in his first year in the Senate, he joined an agreement “that allowed Congress to interject itself (in the Schiavo case) into the decision-making process of the families.”
Obama added: ‘I think that was a mistake, and I think the American people understood that was a mistake. And as a constitutional law professor, I knew better.”
Apparently he knew well enough then to vote for due process, but his rethinking has since muddled.
I recommend to Obama — if he wants to make amends — that he consult the disability-rights experts at Not Dead Yet for the facts of the Terri Schiavo case and its acute relevance to many Americans in similar situations.
Not Dead Yet is about 12 miles from Chicago at 7521 Madison St., Forest Park, Ill. If this presidential contender and former law professor had bothered to do his own research, he would have discovered — as I did in four years of covering this story and interviewing participants, including neurologists, on both sides, that:
The husband of the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo, Michael Schiavo, had stopped testing and rehabilitation for her in 1993, 12 years before her death. Moreover, for years he had been living with another woman, with whom he had two children, and whom he has since married.
And he only came up with the excuse ‘this is what she would have wanted’ long after her mysterious collapse and subsequent debilitation, with her family and lifelong friends insisting that thinking was totally foreign to Terri’s true character and sensitivity toward life. One of her closest friends testified in court that in a conversation about the famous case of Karen Ann Quinlan, Terri told her “where there’s life, there’ hope”, and yet the bizarre inisistence of Michael Schiavo prevailed, against all reason and evidence. And backed by the right-to-die movement. Though Terri wasn’t dying.
To say now that the intervention to ensure her rights to due process was a mistake is irresponsible, in Henthoff’s restrained opinion.
He should be proud of the Senate vote he now recants — and learn a lot more about the disabled.
Here’s a good place to start.