Reply #48: Yes, Hentoff is an anti choice hack. Antichoicers have created this circus

[ultraist]

Antichoice to make end of life decisions about our own bodies and antichoice to make reproductive decisions about our own bodies.

excerpts
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0513,lerner,62490,6.html

The Schiavo Circus
The Brothers Bush turn flips—no net!—for right-to-lifers

by Sharon Lerner
March 29th, 2005 11:43 AM write to us

Have a family dilemma? No worries. The Bush brothers are on the way! As the parents of Terri Schiavo will tell you, George and Jeb will do anything to resolve your wrenching personal crisis. These guys will leap over state courts in a single bound, tromp with their alligator boots on a woman's wishes for her own death, and shred a couple hundred years of governing precedent as if it were written on that old, crumbly Constitution stock—as long as it serves their political purposes. Or as long as they think it does.

This personal tragedy might have been just that, if Jeb hadn't latched on to it, using every power of his office—and then some—in an attempt to get what he wanted. Although state courts had repeatedly agreed that her tube could be removed, the Florida governor ordered it reinserted in 2003. Then he appointed a physician and lawyer to be Schiavo's guardian; after reviewing the case, the guardian found that Schiavo was in fact in a persistent vegetative state and that the courts had done their jobs. Frustrated, Jeb joined with Schiavo's parents in taking the remarkable step of asking Congress to transfer their case to federal court.

Cue the all-out culture war.

Suddenly, Terri Schiavo was on her way to being the great political issue that would excite the pro-life base, as a Republican memo floating around Washington recently put it. The case would pluck the same nerves fired by the anti-abortion movement—but without ever mentioning the tricky A-word. Her death, and the macabre fight to stop it, would be the new partial-birth debate, only more heartrending. Or so religious conservatives believed.

Soon George was cutting his vacation short to show his concern (a first for the president). Terri's parents were off to see the first of three federal judges. And Jeb was trying to get custody of Schiavo transferred to the state of Florida after finding an expert who finally told him what he wanted to hear: that Schiavo may not really be in a persistent vegetative state. George Bush's change of heart should resolve any doubt that, at least on the president's part, the Terri Schiavo showdown has been a matter of politics rather than principle. While the religious conservatives pushing to "save" Schiavo insisted that she wasn't in a persistent vegetative state and had a chance of improving, most want a person in her condition kept alive no matter the prognosis. "Her worth in God's eyes makes her physical condition truly irrelevant," as the Focus on the Family website put it. The connection between a woman with no cognitive function and other people's fetuses and embryos isn't lost on Operation Rescue, the National Right to Life Committee, the Pro-Life Action League, and the like, which have shifted their single-minded obsessiveness from abortion to Schiavo.
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