Keep the facts straight in right-to-life case

I refer to the case of Florida woman Terri Schiavo who is brain-damaged and requires a feeding tube, not a respirator, to stay alive. Whether one is pro-life or pro-choice, the coming days will hold no pleasure for anyone who follows this story. Yet as it progresses it might be best if we keep facts straight, as Post cartoonist Harry failed to do on March 22. Mrs Schiavo is not brain-dead, as Harry drew in his cartoon, but has severe brain damage. It is not a semantic difference in terms.

Contrast Harry's nasty anti-Bush cartoon with the front page story, 'Right-to-life case back with US judge' (March 22), which laid out the facts that this was a legal battle between Mrs Schiavo's parents and siblings who say they know their daughter wants to live and they see understanding in her eyes; with her obviously loving husband who claims he knows his wife's wishes, and that she would want to die rather than live in the condition she is now in.

One has to question the editorial judgment that one undertakes to have such a mean-spirited cartoon. On no level does this cartoon work for anyone but the most spiteful.

The battle for Mrs Schiavo's life has been ongoing in full force for close to eight years. That this has become a political issue is neither surprising nor sad. We have competing members of this woman's family doing all they can to undertake what they see as her wishes.

While I come down on the side of her family, I fully expect them to lose based on the merits of the case as per current US laws. But I don't expect them, as I would expect no parent who thought they were fighting for the life of their child, to simply submit because their efforts offend others, including Harry.

Missed in all of this, and maybe the lesson that some might take away from watching this uniquely American drama unfold, is that at the core of both sides' arguments is 'the individual'. A family fights to save their daughter's life, a husband fights to uphold what he thinks are his wife's wishes in regards to her quality of life, and the three branches of the US government, congress, executive, judicial, take note and act. While political and religious beliefs are core to the dispute, they, too, are beliefs based on the value of the individual.