Nat Hentoff on Obama and Schiavo

Nat Hentoff is a familiar name for those of us in the battles against euthanasia, assisted suicide, and infanticide.

The comments Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama made during the February 26th debate with Hillary Clinton caught Hentoff’s attention as well as ours.

Writing in Jewish World Review, Hentoff writes:

In none of the endless presidential candidates’ debates has there been a meaningful discussion of the rights of disabled Americans. However, in the Feb. 26 debate in Cleveland, Barack Obama casually and ignorantly revealed his misunderstanding of the basic issue in the highly visible and still-resonating official death sentence of a disabled woman, Terri Schiavo. I have repeatedly called her death the result of “the longest public execution in American history.”

In his first sentence, Hentoff has identified a silence that has escaped others in the media. No presidential candidate, of either party, has discussed the issues facing Americans with disabilities. Both Clinton and Obama have detailed positions on disability issues on their campaign sites, but it’s not something they talk about in debates or on the stump. I’m not sure if John McCain has any positions on disability issues on his own campaign site, but his silence on our issues is as thorough as his Democrat counterparts.

The omission of disability issues in the presidential debates isn’t his main point though:

When moderator Tim Russert asked Hillary Clinton and Obama if “there are any words or votes that you’d like to take back … in your careers in public service,” Obama answered that in his first year in the Senate, he joined an agreement “that allowed Congress to interject itself (in the Schiavo case) into the decision-making process of the families.”

Obama added: ‘I think that was a mistake, and I think the American people understood that was a mistake. And as a constitutional law professor, I knew better.”

When he was a professor of constitutional law, Obama probably instructed his students to research and know all the facts of a case. The reason Congress asked
the federal courts to review the Schiavo case was that the 41-year-old woman about to be dehydrated and starved to death was breathing normally on her own, was not terminal, and there was medical evidence that she was responsive, not in a persistent vegetative state.

One of the leading congressional advocates of judicial review was staunchly liberal Democratic Tom Harkin of Iowa, because he is deeply informed about disability rights. By contrast, in all of this inflamed controversy, the mainstream media performed miserably, copying each other’s errors instead of doing their own investigations of what Terri’s wishes actually were. Consequently, most Americans did not know that 29 major national disability-rights organizations filed legal briefs and lobbied Congress to understand that this was not a right-to-die case, but about the right to continue living.

A caveat here – when Hentoff talks about “mainstream media” I hope he is including Fox News Channel along with MSNBC and other “mainstream” sources. Fox News was every bit as guilty as other networks in terms of framing the fight for Terri Schiavo’s life as a “culture wars” controversy as the other networks were. This wasn’t “liberal” bias – the right and the left worked in tandem on this – and in a way that kept the perspectives and involvement of disability advocates out of the public discourse.

Read the rest of the article here.

And for more info on safeguards recommended by disability advocates for people under guardianship in terms of treatment withdrawal, check out the STATEMENT OF COMMON PRINCIPLES ON LIFE-SUSTAINING CARE AND TREATMENT OF PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES and the list of organizational endorsements for the Statement. –Stephen Drake