Why Do They Oppose Killing Christa Pike But Support Killing Terri Schiavo?

This article was originally published at Lifenews.com.

The events in Tennessee surrounding the recent failed executions of two death-row inmates once again raise questions about how our society defines cruelty.

In May, officials spent more than an hour attempting to establish an IV line for death-row inmate Tony Carruthers before calling off the execution. Witnesses described him showing signs of pain and discomfort as medical personnel struggled to gain IV access.

On September 30, officials administered two doses of pentobarbital to Christa Pike, yet she survived. As a result, Tennessee Governor Bill Lee halted the state’s remaining executions for the year and ordered an independent investigation. At last report, Pike is recovering and speaking after being unconscious and on a ventilator.

Because of how Pike’s procedure was botched, a debate is once again raging over whether her execution amounted to unnecessary pain and suffering, and whether such a procedure can meet constitutional standards prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

This is not new. Since the 1960s, death penalty opponents have fervently argued that capital punishment constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Their efforts appeared partially effective when a 1986 U.S. Supreme Court ruling prohibited the death penalty for those who were severely mentally ill, a protection expanded in 2002 to include individuals with intellectual disabilities.

However, the zeal to protect human life ends at the prison gates. Although persistent efforts are made to ensure that executions do not violate constitutional protections, medically defenseless Americans are routinely denied food and water through the withdrawal of feeding tubes in hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices across our country, leaving them to die from dehydration and starvation.

This is what happened to my sister, Terri Schiavo. Twenty-one years ago, my family witnessed a profound moral shift in how we view the lives of the vulnerable. Terri sustained a brain injury that left her unable to swallow. She depended on others to meet her basic needs. Yet, on March 18, 2005, at the request of her estranged husband and by order of a Florida circuit court judge, Terri’s feeding tube was removed, denying her food and water despite our family’s pleading to care for her. Following a protracted legal battle that lasted over ten years, Terri died an agonizing death that took nearly two weeks.

Despite the brutal nature of such deaths and the alarming frequency with which they happen, there is no effort to stop this cruelty, let alone any mention of any Eighth Amendment rights being violated. For the better part of a generation, cultural elites—the same groups that vehemently oppose the death penalty—have ensured that withholding nutrition and hydration from the medically vulnerable remains legal in all 50 states.

In the 1980s, bioethicist Daniel Callahan, co-founder of The Hastings Center, openly stated: “The denial of nutrition may become the only effective way to make certain that a large number of biologically tenacious patients actually die.”

Callahan viewed feeding tubes as the primary obstacle to ending the lives of medically dependent patients who were “living too long.” In other words, he wanted the medical community to have the authority to deny or withdraw feeding tubes from society’s most medically fragile.

In the wake of Callahan’s statement, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered its landmark decision in Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health (1990). In deciding the fate of Nancy Cruzan, a young woman left severely brain-injured in a car crash, the Court recognized nutrition and hydration as “medical treatment” rather than a basic human right.

Once embedded in American law, this precedent opened a Pandora’s box in all 50 states. By redefining feeding tubes, along with evolving state laws, hospital policies, and insurance pressures, it systematically transferred life-and-death decisions away from family members and into the hands of physicians, bureaucrats, and ethics committees. 

Today, terms like lethal injection, suffering, execution, and cruel treatment are used to create sympathy for convicted murderers. Yet for victims like Terri, who committed no crime other than the offense of being unable to swallow, phrases such as “withdrawal of artificial life support” and “death with dignity” are used to sanitize the harsh reality that they, too, are being sentenced to death.

In reality, what my family witnessed during the nearly two weeks since Terri’s feeding tube withdrawal until her death was anything but a “death with dignity.” My sister’s lips and skin cracked and blistered, turning different shades of blue. Her extreme breathing patterns and constant moaning were horrific. We stared in disbelief at her skeletal face and the blood pooling in her deeply sunken eyes. Calling this “dignity” was a lie; it was evil.

This is why my family established the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network: to ensure that what happened to Terri, and what continues to happen to others every day, is never forgotten.

These unprotected individuals are increasingly threatened by a radical and wicked worldview that rejects Christian teaching, undermines the family, and devalues human life. We have a moral responsibility to stand with these patients and their families, defend their God-given dignity, and ensure that no one is abandoned or denied the life-affirming care they deserve.

So, while hypocritical voices continue to decry the cruelty of how we execute death-row inmates, we will continue our fight for the real victims who suffer truly cruel and unjust punishment. If our nation and its legal system show mercy to convicted murderers, it is long past time we extend that same basic humanity to the innocent.