Pulling the Plug is Personal, Take it From Someone Who's Been There
Story Adelina Cabrera

For someone who has experienced what it's like to have a loved one taken off life support, I am appalled by the Terry Schiavo case – less by the opinions of those who may have judged us, but more by George Bush and right-wingers who are using her as collateral damage to advance their agenda of enforcing their morals on our personal lives.

Night after night, images of Terry run within the first thirty seconds of any news media. Over these images are words like “right to life,” “vulnerable,” “respect” – moral abstractions masked as political terms. Even Entertainment Tonight did a “what do the celebrities think?” segment, where the wife from “Everybody Loves Raymond” was telling me about the sacredness of life.  

This is political theater at its cheapest, a bad commercial put on by President Bush that's gone too far.

In his Presidential statement to the nation, Bush proclaimed, “In instances like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws, and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life.”

You wouldn't think this was the same man who presided over more death row executions while he was Texas Governor than all other governors combined, signed Texas law which authorizes physicians to refuse to acknowledge a patient or their family's wishes to extend the patient's life or proposed $45 billion in cuts to Medicaid over the next ten years.  The same Medicaid that is paying for Terry's bills and keeping her alive. This is the President who has been silent about the recent school shooting at the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota, and has sent thousands of young people to Iraq to kill and die.

The “right to life” is a concept that is apparently all good when it comes to one woman in Florida and to stop abortion, but everybody else is on their own.

To place such a personal family moment like this in the center-ring of a political battle is to disrespect its sacredness.  Six years ago, my family decided to take my uncle off life support.  He had a stroke that put him in a coma that he never woke up from.  He was a cool uncle too – the one that cracked jokes all the time, that everyone waited for at parties because he can get ‘em started, and took in family at our most desperate moments.  To see him in a coma was to see him in his most opposite state. In making the decision to take him off life support, our family considered the piling medical bills, and thought about what he would have wanted. Deep down inside, I knew that he would have wanted to go.  He had witnessed his brother (my father) beholden to a wheelchair for the last fourteen years of my father's life because of a stroke, and I believe he would not have wanted his own family to go through that.

Until Terry's case appeared in the media, I had forgotten how intimate that moment was to be next to him in the hospital room -- to say goodbye, thank you, and I love you.

It must be extra difficult for the loved ones of Terry because moments near death are usually solemn and private, not circus-like, filled with protesters, media interviews and a President who's trying to hustle policy.

The conservative right-wing may have succeeded in making Terry Schiavo the poster-child for the vulnerable and helpless, and inversely, elevated Bush and his cohorts to white-knight hero status.  But in their tactic to humanize the story of “Right to Life,” they have instead de-humanized Terry and those of us who have really experienced such struggles. Moments like these are beyond political and doing so cheapens not just Terry's story, but all of us.