A-Z Guide to the Year in Medicine

(14 of 20)

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REUTERS SCHIAVO: In this famous photograph she looked deceptively alert

RIGHT TO DIE Americans have often fought bitterly over how and when to end human life. But there's never been a battle quite like the one that culminated last March, when doctors removed the life-sustaining feeding tube from Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who had been languishing in a persistent vegetative state--awake but unaware--since 1990. The battle that began in private between Schiavo's husband and guardian Michael, who insisted she did not want to be kept alive in such a condition, and Schiavo's parents, who vehemently disagreed, played out on the public stage. The issue sparked fierce debates in Washington, where then House majority leader Tom DeLay called the removal of the tube an "act of medical terrorism" and Congress passed a midnight law giving federal courts a chance to make doctors reinsert it. The courts refused to hear the case, and Schiavo was allowed to die. An autopsy showed that her brain had atrophied and that her condition was, as her husband had claimed, irreversible.