Bobby Schindler still remembers his older sister’s love of animals.
“We had a Labrador growing up, a family pet that she just adored,” he told OSV News about his sister, Terri Schiavo, and their dog, Bucky. “He had … a brain tumor, and he fell over and collapsed … and Terri reached out and tried to give it mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.”
“I don’t think she knew how to do it,” he added, but “she was trying to do everything she could to save her dog.”
Schindler spoke about Schiavo ahead of the 20th anniversary of her death — a death that followed a years-long legal battle that made international headlines and captured the attention of then-President George W. Bush, U.S. members of Congress and even the Vatican.
Schiavo, who had suffered a serious brain injury, died on March 31, 2005, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed at the decision of her husband, Michael, against the wishes of her parents and siblings. She was 41.
Her case led Schindler to dedicate his life to helping families in similar situations through the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, an organization dedicated to upholding human dignity by serving those who are medically vulnerable. The network, which provides a 24/7 crisis lifeline service for at-risk patients and families, has helped thousands since its founding in 2005.
Schindler, together with Dr. Tim Millea, chair of the Catholic Medical Association Health Care Policy Committee, spoke with OSV News about the challenges since Schiavo’s death to upholding the dignity of life for the medically vulnerable.
“We knew Terri had a severe brain injury, and we knew that she most likely was never going to improve to the point where she was going to be able to take care of herself,” said Schindler, a Paige Comstock Cunningham senior fellow at Americans United for Life and an associate scholar at Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. “That never mattered to our family: Terri was a human being. She had value and worth and … she only needed food and hydration to live.”
Schindler revealed why, 20 years later, he still talks about his sister.
“I want people never to forget about the injustices of what happened to my sister,” he said. “But also because it’s happening to others just like my sister every single day across countless hospitals, hospices, nursing homes.”
“It’s legal now in all 50 states to either withdraw or deny a person feeding tubes just like my sister,” he added, saying that this challenges Catholic Church teaching.
A year before Schiavo’s death, St. John Paul II addressed this topic in “Life-Sustaining Treatments and the Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas,” where he writes that the “administration of water and food, even when provided by artificial means, always represents a natural means of preserving life, not a medical act.”
“Its use, furthermore, should be considered, in principle, ordinary and proportionate, and as such morally obligatory, insofar as and until it is seen to have attained its proper finality,” the late pontiff teaches, “which in the present case consists in providing nourishment to the patient and alleviation of his suffering.”
This issue has also been addressed in other church documents, including the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ “Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services,” and the Congregation (now Dicastery) for the Doctrine of the Faith’s “Responses to Certain Questions of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Concerning Artificial Nutrition and Hydration.”
Schiavo and her siblings were raised Catholic. Schindler said that while Schiavo’s husband was not Catholic, the couple married in a Catholic church and Schiavo continued attending Mass. He revealed his sister’s story played a role in his own faith.
“When I went to college in the ’80s, I left the church,” he said. “It was actually my sister’s case that brought me back to my faith.”
Schiavo was 26 when she unexpectedly collapsed while home with her husband in 1990.
“She went several minutes without oxygen and sustained a pretty serious brain injury as a consequence,” Schindler said. “To this day, we do not know what caused it.”
He challenged people today who call people like his sister human “vegetables,” something he has written about previously.
“How we’ve twisted things in our culture today and use euphemisms today to describe people like Terri as having no worth, having no utility, justifying her death because of her poor quality of life,” he said.
Looking back, Millea at the Catholic Medical Association recognized “the inexorable decline in the respect for the dignity of every life over the past several decades.”
“Even prior to Terri Schiavo’s death, our society was already beginning to accept the unethical premise that an unnatural death was reasonable,” he said in emailed comments. “Whether it be by assisted suicide or withdrawal of nutrition and hydration without consent, or ultimately euthanasia, the risk to our most vulnerable people is great.”
As president of the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network, Schindler revealed that his organization receives calls from families pressured by hospitals, doctors or administrators, or insurance companies to stop treatment for a loved one within hours or days of a brain injury instead of giving them the chance to recover through therapy and rehabilitation.
He expressed concern over “a shift in control over treatment decisions from patients and their loved ones or surrogates to external authorities.”
“What I’m seeing more of today is … how quick decisions are being made to stop treatment after a brain injury,” he said. “We get all kinds of calls, but if you had to ask me, they are the most frequent.”
Like Schindler earlier, Millea said that incidents like Schiavo’s are continuing, in addition to efforts to legalize and expand assisted suicide.
“This begs some simple questions,” he said. “Aren’t we better than that? Why are we not increasing funding for hospice and palliative care rather than making people die sooner? What is to stop a ‘right to die’ from devolving into a ‘duty to die’? Why should we do the ‘easy’ thing instead of the ‘right’ thing? Is medicine becoming a profession that ends life rather than protecting it?”
At the same time, he said, awareness is growing.
“The fight to protect life at all stages will continue, but there is an encouraging trend,” Millea concluded. “More and more Americans are recognizing the darkness of deaths like Terri’s, at the hands of those who should be helping them at their most vulnerable times.”
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