Last week, Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo, known to cable-news viewers and talk-radio listeners as Terri, was as ubiquitous as Elian Gonzalez and Laci Peterson once were. Yet she was also hidden, obscured behind layers of political and religious posturing, legal manoeuvering, emotional projection, and media exploitation that swaddled her like strips of linen around a mummy.Terri Schiavo was born on December 3, 1963, near Philadelphia, the first of three children of Robert and Mary Schindler. As a teen-ager, she was obese — at eighteen, she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds — but with diligence she lost a hundred pounds, and by the time she married Michael Schiavo, in 1984, she was an attractive and vivacious young woman. By the end of the decade, she had moved with her husband to Florida, was undergoing fertility treatments, and had slimmed down further, to a hundred and ten pounds. On February 25, 1990, Terri suffered cardiac arrest, leading to severe brain damage. The cause was a drastically reduced level of potassium in her bloodstream, a condition frequently associated with bulimia. Her death that day was forestalled by heroic measures, including a tracheotomy and ventilation. But when, after a few weeks, she emerged from a coma, it was only to enter a “persistent vegetative state”, with no evidence or hope of improvement — a diagnosis that, in the fifteen years since, has been confirmed, with something close to unanimity, by many neurologists on many occasions on behalf of many courts. The principal internal organs of Terri’s body, including her brain stem, which controls such involuntary actions as heartbeat, digestion, respiration, and the bodily sleep cycle, continued to function as long as liquid nourishment was provided through a tube threaded into her stomach through a hole in her abdomen. The exception was her cerebral cortex, which is the seat of language, of the processing of sense impressions, of thought, of awareness of one’s surroundings and one’s inner state—in short, of consciousness. Her EKG flatlined. The body lived; the mind died.Terri Schiavo has become a metaphor in the religio-cultural struggle over abortion. This — along with the advantages of demonising the judiciary in preparation for the coming battle over Supreme Court nominees — explains the eagerness of Republican politicians to embrace her parents’ cause. Her lack of awareness actually increased her metaphoric usefulness. Like a sixty-four-cell blastocyst, she was without consciousness. Unlike the blastocyst, she was without potential. If letting her body die is murder, goes the logic, then thwarting the development of the blastocyst can surely be nothing less.Excerpted from an article by Hendrik Hertzberg in the April 4 issue of ‘The New Yorker’
