@newspaperarticle {66371,
	title = {End-of-Life Issues: Terri Schiavo deserved to die with more dignity},
	year = {2005},
	note = {Vlad Perju and Paulo Daflon Barrozo are doctoral students at Harvard Law School.},
	month = {Apr 4, 2005},
	publisher = {San Francisco Chronicle},
	abstract = {
Too busy taking sides in the tragedy that has befallen Terri Schiavo, we 
have forgotten to question the choices open to us and to her. In fact, 
this debate is less about dying than about how to die. 
Schiavo wanted and deserved to die with dignity, yet nothing of what she 
received came close to a dignified death. Together with food and water, 
society withheld from her the option of a quiet, peaceful and swift death 
by active euthanasia. We should think of Schiavo as not just the victim of 
an accident that occurred 15 years ago, but also of a society that has 
structured its public conversation about matters of life, death and 
dignity in ways that fail to do justice to those who need it most. 
Instead of asking only whether a person would prefer to die should she 
find herself in a permanent vegetative state, we ought to factor in the 
ancillary question of what kind of death she would be willing to die. As 
we know, in Schiavo{\textquoteright}s case, the withholding of food and water over a 
period of two weeks triggered chemical imbalances in her organism, and 
ultimately her death. She died slowly, gradually. Although she apparently 
did not feel any of this, her family did, and so did we. 
From close or from afar, the spectacle of a human being fading away had a 
symbolism to it that is a heavy burden to carry. It is not unreasonable to 
intimate that forcing her to die this kind of death violates her right to 
decide how she wanted to be remembered, as U.S. Supreme Court Justice 
William Brennan argued in his dissent in Cruzan vs. Director in 1990. 
Schiavo was probably unfamiliar with the distinction between acts and 
omissions that is still a pillar of her country{\textquoteright}s legal system. She 
probably could not have fathomed that in her society it is legal to let 
someone starve to death, but illegal, unless when motivated by society{\textquoteright}s 
will to punish, to inject a lethal substance into that person. We find it 
more acceptable to see a human being dying away slowly without food and 
water than to imagine euthanasia.  
It is hard to grasp why that should be so. The experience of other 
countries has proved flat wrong the familiar argument that euthanasia can 
be abused, which is regularly invoked in this context and has figured 
prominently whenever courts confronted this question. Another possible 
argument to the effect that actively killing someone would have a negative 
impact on the image of the medical profession in society wrongly assumes 
that removing the feeding tube followed by inaction is less damaging to 
how we look at our medical doctors. We are left with the conclusion that 
such a framework is steeped in a hypocritical belief that we society, we 
judges, we doctors, are not the ones ending Schiavo{\textquoteright}s life. That is a lie, 
and not a noble one. 
We all want to die with dignity. We hope to exit this life uncrushed by 
the fear of our passing and of the unknown that awaits us. Death is as 
deeply personal as it incomprehensible, and a mature society should aim at 
respecting the decisions of its members about when and how to die. The 
laws of Terri Schiavo{\textquoteright}s country made it impossible for her to die with 
dignity, as she wanted, and virtually no voice echoed her all-too-human 
wish. She deserved better. },
	url = {http://www.sfgate.com/},
	author = {Perju, Vlad and Daflon Barrozo, Paulo}
}
