Just over a week ago Terri Schiavo was pronounced clinically dead. She died because a feeding tube, which kept her body alive for over 15 years, was removed by orders of the judiciary two weeks earlier. The removal of the tube was at the bequest of her husband, Michael Schiavo, and challenged in the courts by Terri's parents.

That decision sparked an unseemly and disgraceful stunt by politiicians and religiious groups who together demonstrated that they had not one ounce of compassion for a family torn apart in a terrible moral and personal conflict.

Why did 19 judges in 7 different courts time and again order that the feeding tube be removed?

In order to understand how they came to their decision it is necessary to look deeper at Terri's physical condition at the time. Terri was in what is known as a persistant vegetatvie state. In Terri's case this was caused by her brain being starved of oxygen because of a heart failure 15 years earlier. People can recover from a persistent vegetative state, but there are limits beyond which recovery is not possible. In exhaustive reviews on PVS a team of doctors examined 700 patients and discovered that 15% of those that suffered damage from oxygen starvation, like Terri, recover some degree of awareness within 3 months. After this crucial period however, very few people recovered and none have ever recovered after two years. Terri was in this state for over 15 years.

So what were we seeing when the media networks continually and shamelessly showed Terri awake and seemingly aware? The human brain works much like a computer when it is switched on. Lights flicker, fans whir and the screen flashes on. All this has to happen before the operating system, such as Windows, can start up. In a human, the primitive part of the brain stem which controls reflexes and the sleep-wake cycles comes on first. After this has been completed areas of the cerebral cortex, the seat of conscious thought, kick in and the patient becomes aware. With Terri this second, crucial phase hasn't occurred for 15 years and within all reasonable doubt it never will again. That part of her brain which controls awareness and conscious thought is nothing more, sadly, than dead and withered brain cells, no more alive than is a dried flower. This was confirmed by all her doctors and neuro-scientists over a 15 year period who confirmed that to all intents and purposes Terri, the human being, died 15 years ago.

This should have been the end of the story but for the terrible familial conflict which pitched Terri's husband against Terri's parents. It became politicised, with the Republicans circulating a memo observing that Terri's case was 'a great political issue'. Bush became involved, using a cheap stunt of flying into the Whitehouse on a helicopter at 3 am in the morning to sign a presidential decree ordering the replacement of the feeding tube, when the bill could easily have been flown to him in Texas for signing. But Bush, the great deciever who has presided over the deaths of tens of thousands of people in unecessary war and in his own states execution chambers thought he could profit from this sad affair. He callously encouraged the delusional fantasy of Terri's parents and cruelly gave them the false lie that there was hope for her daughter when there was none. The courts once again rightly rejected the bill and finally Terri's body was allowed to die without suffering.

In the meantime the self-pious, hand-wringing, wailing hypocrites of the religious right were issuing death threats to Terri's husband and to the judges that made the straight forward decision to let Terri's body die. By neuro-science standards this was not a difficult decision, there were precedents, a wealth of scientific evidence and humane considerations all to be considered and they all pointed to the same conclusion. While the media, the politicians and the religious lobbies were screeching their hypocrisy, in Bush's own state of Texas, Sun Hudson, a 6 month old infant with a fatal congenital condition, had his feeding tube pulled. His penniless mother wanted him to be kept alive as long as possible, but the hospital didn't want to pay for the continuing caring. Under the Texas Futile Care law the hospital legally terminated the infant's life. The law was signed by one George W. Bush.

But the story doesn't end there. Republican senators have now begun to shriek at the judges, even encouraging violence against them simply because they did their job of ruling justly on a straightforward if tragic case. Delay and Frist want to politicise the judiciary, simply because they do not believe in the seperation of the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, they believe only in extending their own power. While they go to work calling for judges to be impeached if they disagree with some Senators political view, Delay voted for slashing Medicaid by $15 billion, denying money to the poorest of people in nursing homes, some of whom are on feeding tubes.

But perhaps all is not lost, a recent poll indicates that 82% of people disapprove of the involvement of both Bush and Congress in this sad, personal affair. Perhaps America is finally waking up and seeing the president for what he is, a self-serving fantasist that has dragged their nation into the moral sewer that now seems to encapsulate everything American. In a land that is deeply ignorant of history, of geo-politics, of science and of rationality, perhaps a sense of moral outrage is at last being stoked up.

Meanwhile, Terri's tragic case and that of her broken family may have a consequence for the good. Up and down the country people are now having the conversation with their loved ones, thinking the unthinkable, and asking one another what to do if such a terrible fate befell them. Perhaps people in the future can avoid this dreadful dilemma, and prevent the perverted circus of the media, the religious right and the politicians.

Let this be Terri's legacy, her final act of kindness, her epitaph.

yechydda,