Lessons of the Schiavo Battle

Pat Robertson called the removal of her feeding tube "judicial murder," and House majority leader Tom DeLay described it as an "act of medical terrorism." Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, one of only five House Republicans to vote against Congress's emergency legislation throwing the Terri Schiavo case into the federal courts, declared that "this Republican Party of Lincoln has become a party of theocracy." Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, acting as spokesman for the parents of the severely brain damaged woman and making even his counterparts on the conservative right wince in embarrassment, inveighed in a mass e-mailing that Florida State Circuit Court Judge George Greer, who approved the request by Schiavo's husband to let her die, "has shown more courage in trying to kill Terri Schiavo than Governor [Jeb] Bush has shown in trying to save her." Just a few days before Easter, Brother Paul O'Donnell, a Franciscan monk and spiritual adviser to Robert and Mary Schindler, Schiavo's parents, said, "We pray that this modern-day crucifixion will not happen."

With Schiavo's life hanging in the balance, and people on both sides of the case holding strong beliefs about her right to live or die, passions were understandably running high. But as the endless barrage of inflammatory rhetoric and sometimes blatant posturing continued, the Florida woman at the center of the bitterly fought case seemed to have become a sideshow. "This is not about Terri Schiavo," says George Annas, chairman of the health law department at Boston University School of Public Health. "I think this is about abortion and stem cells. Congress wants to say that we need pro-life judges because the judiciary is out of control and favors death over life." Most Americans disapproved of the congressional action--and showed little faith in the stated, high-minded motives behind it. In a TIME poll conducted last week, fully three-quarters of respondents (including 68% of Republicans) said it was wrong for Congress to intervene, and two-thirds said they believed that Washington's action was more rooted in politics than principles.

Having conspicuously interrupted a vacation to return to Washington to sign Congress's bill in the wee hours of the morning--although he could have approved it from his ranch in Texas--President George W. Bush did not escape the public's displeasure. In TIME's poll, 70% disapproved of his role in the drama. As federal and Florida state courts continued to reject appeals from Schiavo's parents to reinsert her feeding tube, Washington may have started to get the message. Bush, DeLay and Senator Bill Frist of Tennessee were suddenly as quiet as the Democrats had been all along; the Republican congressional leaders declined opportunities to speak about Schiavo on the Sunday-morning talk shows. "The winners of this are going to be the people who stop talking about it," said a senior Republican strategist.