This month — March 30th — will mark 20 years since Terri Schindler Schiavo was cruelly killed, deprived of food and water for 13 days until she finally succumbed to dehydration and starvation. It was one of the most controversial bioethics issues to arise since Roe v. Wade, in what many deemed a victory for supposed “medical choice.” Now, two decades later, a pair of bioethicists is revisiting Terri’s death, and argued that while they believe killing her was the right decision, it also ended up leading to the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The Hastings Center is a bioethics research institute in New York, and on its blog, Arthur Caplan and Dominic Sisti made the outlandish claim about Schiavo. And while the Hastings Center claims to be non-partisan, Caplan, at least, is certainly biased on this issue. He has argued that EMTALA requires hospitals to commit abortions, has called for Catholic hospitals to be defunded while Planned Parenthood receives taxpayer dollars, and believes children with disabilities should be denied organ transplants.
In their op-ed, Caplan and Sisti play fast and loose with the facts surrounding Terri’s death, as well as her condition.
While she needed to be fed through a tube, she could breathe without assistance, was not sick or dying, and had no condition that would lead to her imminent death. Terri was severely disabled, but numerous doctors said there was the possibility of improvement, particularly with access to therapy.
Terri Schindler Schiavo with her mother
Fighting for death
She had been receiving rehabilitative services at first, which led her to be able to speak a few words, but her husband, Michael Schiavo, stopped providing those services after 1991. Though Terri had been predicted to live a normal life span, Schiavo eventually met and moved in with another woman and fathered children with her, only then ‘remembering’ that Terri said she wouldn’t have wanted to live with such a disability.
Despite her parents’ objections and willingness to care for her themselves, Schiavo fought to have his wife slowly and torturously killed — and he didn’t bother to mandate that she receive any comfort care whatsoever.
As her brother, Bobby Schindler, has recounted:
These are the hard facts my family and I will have to live with for the rest of my life: After almost two weeks without food or water, my sister’s lips were horribly cracked, to the point where they were blistering. Her skin became jaundiced with areas that turned different shades of blue. Her skin became markedly dehydrated from the lack of water. Terri’s breathing became rapid and uncontrollable, as if she was outside sprinting.
Her moaning, at times, was raucous, which indicated to us the insufferable pain she was experiencing.
Terri’s face became skeletal, with blood pooling in her deeply sunken eyes and her teeth protruding forward. Even as I write this, I can never properly describe the nightmare of having to watch my sister have to die this way.
What will be forever seared in my memory is the look of utter horror on my sister’s face when my family visited her just after she died.
Instead of acknowledging how horrific her death at the hands of her husband was, Caplan and Sisti lionize him as the person “who knew her best” and had the “authority” to fight for her “values.” (More facts about Terri’s life, and cruel death, can be read here.)
Schiavo’s death ’emboldened’ the pro-life movement
Yet for Caplan and Sisti, Terri’s death is notable today solely because, they claim, it “emboldened” the pro-life movement, which in turn, led to the fall of Roe in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
In retrospect, Schiavo launched a new, emboldened prolife movement, one that would eventually lead to conservative rule in state houses across the U.S. and the election, twice, of Donald Trump.
The seeding of a new ultraconservative judiciary would support a strategic assault on medical privacy that would eventually lead to the end of legal abortion protection in Dobbs.
Schiavo established a dangerous precedent in which politicians determined medical care, not patients and not their spouses.
Of course, the pro-life movement launched decades before 2005; the National Right to Life Committee, for example, was formed in 1967, while the term “pro-life” had been used since Roe was instituted in 1973.
The pair furthermore talk about the need to “fight to honor Terri’s values in death,” which is even more grotesque, considering her death was the result of the removal of nutrition and hydration from a vulnerable person with disabilities — not removing someone from life support who was artificially being kept alive.
Furthermore, the notion of a more powerful person taking the life of a more vulnerable human being is entirely reminiscent of abortion. No one should have the right to take the life of another person, regardless of the circumstances.
