WASHINGTON (ABP) — Congress has now intervened in the emotional dispute over a brain-damaged Florida woman's fate.
Doctors were scheduled to remove the feeding tube keeping Terri Schiavo alive March 18, unless Florida legislators pass their own bill aimed at preventing it. Doctors have said Schiavo would probably die within two weeks of the tube's removal.
But a Senate committee has subpoenaed Schiavo to appear at a hearing in late March in a bid to keep her alive.
Prior to the Senate announcement, a House committee also announced they would subpoena Schiavo's medical caregivers in an attempt to prevent the removal of the tube.
The 41-year-old Florida woman has been at the center of a legal dispute that pits her parents against her husband and many religious conservatives against Florida's court system.
Schiavo has been in what court-appointed doctors have described as a “persistent vegetative state” since collapsing from a then-undiagnosed illness 15 years ago and suffering significant brain damage. Michael Schiavo has said his wife made clear to him before her illness that she would not want to live in such a state. However, she left no written record of her intentions.
Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, maintain their daughter can be rehabilitated and responds to some stimuli — which many doctors dispute. They have fought for her to remain alive.
The Schindlers' argument has become a favorite cause among many religious conservative and other pro-life groups. But the parents had effectively exhausted every legal recourse available to them, including at the Florida Supreme Court and the federal Supreme Court.
Before the congressional subpoena developments, both chambers had already passed bills aimed at saving the lives of people like Schiavo.
The House of Representatives passed its bill on an unrecorded voice vote late March 16. It would allow federal courts to review state court decisions regarding people in Schiavo's condition. Supporters of the “Protection of Incapacitated Persons Act of 2005” say their bill is narrowly tailored to concern only people who are “incapacitated, are under court ordered removal of food and water and are at the center of a [legal] dispute.”
But senators said that bill was too broad, and passed a version late March 17 tailored to apply only to Schiavo. Given the differences, and with Congress scheduled to enter into its two-week-long Easter recess March 18, the bills appeared dead.
Then Senate officials announced early March 18 that Schiavo and her husband, Michael, had been summoned to a March 28 hearing of the Senate Health, Education and Labor Committee.
Federal law, according to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), protects such witnesses from “from anyone who…influences, obstructs, or impedes an inquiry or investigation by Congress.”