Twenty years after Terri

All of us in the faith and culture writing business can recall those moments in our young lives when we became politically aware. For me, one of those moments was the murder of Terri Schiavo, a young disabled woman whose family’s fight against her court-sanctioned death made headlines around the world. I hadn’t yet been born in 1990, when Terri first collapsed under mysterious circumstances and suffered the brain damage that would leave her locked in for life. But by the early 2000s, when her estranged husband was seeking to remove her basic nourishment and end it all, I was a budding young pro-lifer. My mother, a staunch conservative commentator with a keen interest in constitutional law, followed and documented the case closely. I became invested, because she was invested. But I wasn’t just copying Mom. I understood for myself the difference between good and evil, between life and death.

Terri’s feeding tube was removed for the last time on March 18, 2005, and the family would lose its heroic battle two agonizing weeks later on March 31—symbolically, during Passiontide. Both then-Gov. Jeb Bush and President Bush signed legislation in a last-ditch effort to save her life, but with the state courts against her, she was doomed by constitutional gridlock. WORLD’s long-form podcast Lawless chronicles the many twists and turns of the 15-year saga. What began as a small family tragedy ultimately became a national and international sensation, drawing the attention of the world’s most powerful lawmakers, religious leaders, and celebrities. Without being able to speak a word, one helpless woman forced all of them to grapple with the most vital questions we will ever be asked to answer in this life: Which lives matter? When we are at our most vulnerable, who should decide whether we live or die? 

Within a year of her collapse, Terri was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state, a term with an official definition under Florida law. The definition included “absence of voluntary action” and “inability to communicate or interact purposefully.” To the end, Terri’s family maintained that her condition failed to meet that definition, video-documenting her smiles and reactions to various stimuli. They also maintained that, contrary to Judge George Greer’s 2000 decision, Terri wanted to live.

That decision marked the beginning of the end, as it gave Terri’s caretakers the legal right to dehydrate and starve her. Witnesses on the side of her husband, Michael, claimed that she’d once made comments about wanting someone to “pull the plug” on her. But witnesses on her side recalled very different conversations sparked by the case of Karen Ann Quinlan, whose permanent coma and eventual removal from a ventilator foreshadowed Terri’s death. Young Terri was very distressed by Karen’s plight and objected to people presuming to know that she wouldn’t have wanted to live. But Michael Schiavo’s lawyer exploited some slight discrepancies of memory around the dates of these conversations, speculatively arguing that she was a minor at the time, and they could therefore be discounted. (Readers interested in a thorough defense of Terri’s side can read my mother’s old legal analysis here.)

There would, of course, have been no moral excuse for murdering Terri regardless of her wishes. But we record and condemn the double horror that her murder was based on a lie. More horrific still, there was evidence that she understood a request to say “I want to live” and struggled to vocalize the sounds “AHHHH… WAAAA” in response.

To this day, the left frames the case as a sinister effort by right-wing “Christian nationalists” to override Terri’s “right to die.” In fact, she united activists from across the political spectrum in protest, including self-described “left-wing radicals” fighting for disability rights. No less famous a Democrat than Jesse Jackson made press appearances to advocate for her. When Congress passed an emergency relief bill to have her feeding tube reinserted, even Democrat lawmakers such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer allowed it through with no objection. Although, as Wesley Smith notes, Clinton would later turn around and condemn the campaign once it became unpopular.

Terri’s father followed her in death four years later. The rest of her family has continued to stand up for vulnerable patients like her, founding the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network in her honor. I was recently privileged to meet them at a Michigan event celebrating her life. My heart was full as I took in the tastefully arranged newspaper clippings, photography, artistic tributes, and most poignantly, some of Terri’s own childhood artwork. Here was Bambi and Thumper, there was Baloo the Bear, there were horses and dogs. And lovingly arranged around these, some of Terri’s favorite stuffed animals.

As I introduced myself to Suzanne, Terri’s sister, I tried to explain what her life and death had meant to me, how it had shaped me, how it would always haunt and drive me as a pro-life writer. Suzanne glanced over at a friend with a smile: “And to think that Terri did that.”