Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who did much to create the legal travesty that marred the last years of the Terri Schiavo saga, then embarrassed himself with a vindictive effort to have Michael Schiavo indicted on criminal charges when Bush did not have his way regarding Terri’s treatment, admitted defeat today in this latest legal bungle. In a letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Times, bizarrely titled “Schiavo Case Wasn’t About Politics”, Bush states:

On Thursday, I closed the state inquiry into the Terri Schiavo case.

He goes on to encourage everyone to execute written living wills, on grounds that:

Completing a living will increases the likelihood that a person’s wishes are known, respected, and followed. It also makes a difficult period slightly easier on family members.

Asininely, he claims that “Terri did leave us with a silver lining” - namely, the knowledge that our wishes can more easily be thwarted and our end-of-life care screwed up beyond recognition without ironclad legal protections in our favor. He goes so far as to point out that:

We never know when tragedy will touch our lives. All of America saw the agony Terri’s family experienced. That could have been any person, in any city, in any state. None of us wants our loved ones to go through a similar situation.

without ever acknowledging that it was his meddling, and that of self-appointed right-wing activists who insinuated themselves into the Schindlers’ lives and worked on their emotions for their own political ends, who created the mess that then took years of bitter litigation to resolve. Terri’s oral expressions of her wishes were adjudicated as adequate under Florida law seven years prior to the final resolution of her case - a judgment that was repeatedly upheld in appellate courts. The entire problem could have been solved easily and without dispute as soon as it became obvious that Terri was not going to recover brain functions and the court had been appealed to for its original declarative judgment as to her wishes. No written living will was needed in this case, nor in many others like it. The various false, delusional, and in cases fraudulent objections raised to carrying out her wishes - which did much to delay the satisfaction of her preferences, even though the courts found no substance to those objections - were in many cases aimed at questions that had nothing to do with the lack of written guidance. Meddlers and grandstanding activists simply created reasons to obstruct Terri’s treatment preference for political and religious reasons of their own - among whom few were more prominent or caused more problems than Jeb Bush in his abuse of his governmental powers. It should be said again: there was no reason this case could not have been resolved properly without a written living will, and in fact cases just like it are so resolved every day across the country; the lack of a written expression of the patient’s preferences was only one of many points seized on opportunistically by politically-motivated parties to block Terri’s wishes, and was as groundless as all the others - all of which were decisively rejected by the courts multiple times.

It is merely characteristic cynicism and illogic for Bush to claim that written living wills are needed to prevent problems such as were seen in the Schiavo case: what he is saying is that they are needed to prevent Bush himself from screwing up the healthcare of anyone who does not have one and whose wishes he disapproves - a problem that would seemingly best be resolved by greater maturity and self-control on Bush’s part. At any rate, we know his claim is not true: the presence of a living will would not prevent Bush from bringing his vicious and meddlesome political and religious ideologies into other persons’ private lives, since we have seen already how he has done so in the Schiavo case for multiple, groundless reasons not involving living wills, in some cases ones invented even after the patient had already died. Since Bush seems intent on destroying other people’s lives and wishes on any grounds he chooses, his advice on ways to minimize his own misbehavior on only one such ground hardly matters.

All this is not to say that people should not have living wills. Bush is right that they at least offer somewhat greater protection against people such as himself than not having one. But we know they do not offer absolute protection: like the poor, right-wing assholes we have always with us. More importantly, it is vital to emphasize the central point: it is patients’ preferences themselves that are paramount, not the trivial question of how they are communicated or recorded. Written records are more reliable in some ways (but perhaps less so in others) than oral conversations, but both are valid ways for patients to make their preferences known. Any move to de-privilege oral statements of preference should be strongly opposed - especially in a state like Florida, with a large elderly population among whom many lack written living wills, but in all other states also. And those who would interfere with patients’ preferences however communicated or recorded should be fought as the moral muggers and extortionists that they are.

[Hat tip: Pro-Life Blogs.]