"I don’t think I would have changed anything," he said in response to a questioner during a "Politics and Eggs" breakfast here Friday. "I stayed within the constitutional responsibilities or authority that I had. We changed the law first and then a year later it was ruled unconstitutional and then basically didn't have the ability to do anything. The federal government then intervened and that was ruled unconstitutional. So, she starved to death."

Jeb Bush, making a requisite visit to New Hampshire, told a small group of voters Friday that he had no regrets about injecting the government into a family dispute over whether to keep Florida resident Terri Schiavo alive through a feeding tube when he was governor. Ed O'Keefe reports Wow. So much for keeping the government out of people's personal lives. At the time, those who sided most passionately with keeping Schiavo on life support were fueled by a heavy dose of religious zeal.

When Schiavo's feeding tube was removed and she finally passed in 2005, she had been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years. For nearly half that time, Schiavo's husband and her parents had engaged in a protracted legal battle over whether to keep her on life support. Here's a 2005 article that recalls Bush's role as Florida governor.



No political figure is more entwined in the case than Jeb Bush, who told reporters this week that the Schiavo case is the toughest issue he has faced in nearly seven years as governor. Bush pushed a measure through the Florida Legislature -- which was ruled unconstitutional -- that allowed him to order her feeding resumed six days after her tube was removed in 2003.

In hindsight, Bush said Friday that he wished that Schiavo had signed an advanced directive, or legal document outlining how she would have wanted her end-of-life care managed. "The family could have sorted this out rather than hearsay be the driver of this," he said. "That would have been better."

Ten years after Schiavo's death, Bush's takeaway was this: