BY DANIEL GAITAN | daniel@lifemattersmedia.org

Republican presidential candidates are invoking the contentious Terri Schiavo episode to highlight their conservative principles and stand-out in the crowded primary field.

More than ten years ago, the polarizing fight regarding the fate of a 41-year-old brain damaged Florida woman triggered a national debate about the rights of incapacitated people and how their lives should end if their families are left with no clear instruction.

The Case

After a seven-year, high-profile legal battle, Schiavo’s feeding tube was removed in 2005. Physicians determined that she had been in a persistent vegetative state for nearly 15 years, after cardiac arrest led to debilitating brain damage. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, petitioned for her feeding tube to be removed. He argued that he was honoring his wife’s wish not to be kept alive artificially.

Her parents disagreed, however, and maintained that Schiavo was conscious and should be allowed more time to recover. The case eventually made it to the Florida Supreme Court. “Terri’s Law,” giving then-governor and current presidential candidate Jeb Bush the authority to intervene and reinsert the tube, was ruled unconstitutional.

Many social and religious conservatives argued that Schiavo was not brain dead and could recover if given enough time. Right-to-die advocates and many bioethicists maintained that it was both unethical to provide artificial nutrition and that her husband deserved the final say.

After multiple failed attempts, staff at a Pinellas Park hospice facility permanently disconnected her feeding tube on March 18, 2005, and Schiavo died less than two weeks later.

The controversy could have been avoided if Schiavo had completed advance health care directives outlining her care preferences while of sound mind.

Republican Candidates

Dr. Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon and favorite among many Evangelical Christians, is facing criticism from many sides of the decade-old debate. He upset many of his supporters on Nov. 14 when he told a Florida newspaper that the Schiavo case “was much ado about nothing.”

“Your job is to keep them comfortable throughout that process and not to treat everything that comes up,” he told The Tampa Bay Times.

Those remarks outraged the Schiavo family. Schiavo’s brother, Bobby Schindler, said that Carson spoke from a perspective of prejudice and ignorance.

Carson walked back his comments less than a week later. In an about face, he compared withdrawing life-support to euthanasia.

“I am steadfastly opposed to euthanasia,” Carson told LifeSiteNews. “I regret that my recent comments about Terri Schiavo have been taken out of context and misinterpreted.”

Low-polling candidate Rick Santorum, who worked at the federal level to stop the removal of Schiavo’s feeding tube, took to Twitter to respond to Carson.

“As the co-author of the law that required a fed court review, it was not ‘much ado about nothing,’ ” the former Pennsylvania senator wrote.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush’s campaign is using Schiavo to emphasize the candidate’s socially conservative record as governor. He recently told Iowa voters that he “erred on the side of life as it relates to Terri Schiavo,” The Des Moines Register reports.

In a memoir published earlier this month, Bush recalled his first interactions with Schiavo’s father, Robert Schindler, who in a 2001 email asked him to intervene.

“It was many months before I realized this letter was only the beginning of a very long, complicated, and controversial journey for her family and me,” Bush writes in Reply All, an anthology of emails he received during his governorship.

Standing Out as a Social Conservative in a Crowded Field

Jerald Mast, an associate professor of political science at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wis., said that he believes Republican candidates are using Schiavo to gain support of social conservatives and strengthen themselves against current frontrunner Donald Trump.

“It’s not surprising that candidates performing in the primary for the most conservative Americans use the issue,” he told Life Matters Media.

The “Trump factor” looms large, and candidates need to grab headlines.

“It’s a strange, very, very large field, and there’s a lot of desperation,” he said. “You have Trump dominating, and the other candidates can’t knock him off. You have people jockeying for the share of primary voters who aren’t in Trump’s camp.”

In the future, Mast said that he believes politicians will have to grapple with end of life-related issues.

“The demographics will drive that,” he said. “We are an aging population. People are going to want to know about end of life issues, quality-of-life-issues, retirement and Social Security.”