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LAW BUSH SIGNED AS TEXAS GOVERNOR PROMPTS CRIES OF
HYPOCRISY

Mon Mar 21, 7:22 PM ET

By William Douglas, Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - The federal law that President Bush
signed early Monday in an effort to prolong Terri
Schiavo's life appears to contradict a right-to-die
law that he signed as Texas governor, prompting cries
of hypocrisy from congressional Democrats and some
bioethicists.


In 1999, then-Gov. Bush signed the Advance Directives
Act, which lets a patient's surrogate make life-ending
decisions on his or her behalf.  The measure also
allows Texas hospitals to disconnect patients from
life-sustaining systems if a physician, in
consultation with a hospital bioethics committee,
concludes that the patient's condition is hopeless.


Bioethicists familiar with the Texas law said Monday
that if the Schiavo case had occurred in Texas, her
husband would be the legal decision-maker and, because
he and her doctors agreed that she had no hope of
recovery, her feeding tube would be disconnected.

"The Texas law signed in 1999 allowed next of kin to
decide what the patient wanted, if competent," said
John Robertson, a University of Texas bioethicist.

While Congress and the White House were considering
legislation recently in the Schiavo case, Bush's Texas
law faced its first high-profile test.  With the
permission of a judge, a Houston hospital disconnected
a critically ill infant from his breathing tube last
week against his mother's wishes after doctors
determined that continuing life support would be
futile.


"The mother down in Texas must be reading the Schiavo
case and scratching her head," said Dr. Howard Brody,
the director of Michigan State University's Center for
Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences.  "This
does appear to be a contradiction."


Brody said that, in taking up the Schiavo case, Bush
and Congress had shattered a body of bioethics law and
practice.


"This is crazy. It's political grandstanding," he
said.


Bush's apparent shift on right-to-die decisions wasn't
lost on  Democrats.  During heated debate on the
Schiavo case, Rep. Debbie Wasserman  Schultz, D-Fla.,
accused Bush of hypocrisy.


"It appears that President Bush felt, as governor,
that there was a
point which, when doctors felt there was no further
hope for the patient, that it is appropriate for an
end-of-life decision to be made, even over the
objection of family members," Wasserman Schultz said.
"There is an obvious conflict here between the
president's feelings on this matter now as compared to
when he was governor of Texas."


White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan termed
Wasserman Schultz's remarks "uninformed accusations"
and denied that there was any conflict In Bush's
positions on the two laws.


"The legislation he signed (early Monday) is
consistent with his views,” McClellan said. "The
(1999) legislation he signed into law actually
provided new protections for patients ... prior to the
passage of the '99 legislation that he signed, there
were no protections."


Wasserman Schultz stuck by her remarks when told of
McClellan's comments.


"It's a fact in black and white," she said. "It's a
direct conflict on the position he has in the Schiavo
case."


Tom Mayo, a Southern Methodist University Law School
associate professor who helped draft the Texas law,
said he saw no inconsistency in Bush's stands.


"It's not really a conflict, because the (Texas) law
addresses different types of disputes, meaning the
dispute between decision-maker and physician," he
said. "The Schiavo case is a disagreement among family
members."


Bush himself framed the Schiavo decision this way
Monday.


"This is a complex case with serious issues, but in
extraordinary circumstances like this, it is wise to
always err on the side of life,” the president said
during a Social Security (news - web sites) event in
Tucson, Ariz. He didn't mention the 1999 Texas law.

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