The Midnight Coup

Bedridden for 15 years since she was resuscitated after she stopped breathing, Schiavo now breathes but is incapable of communicating or eating or drinking on her own. Her persistent vegetative state puts one in mind of the final stages of Alzheimer's disease, except that it can last for decades. Whether she can experience the simplest emotion is now the purview of politics, not medicine.

Schiavo's parents stand on one side of the gulf, demanding that she be kept alive by a tube that puts nourishment directly into her stomach. Her husband, whose motives the parents question constantly, says she would not have wanted to live in this dark twilight between physical life and humanity.

In law, a spouse's decisions about care of a mentally incompetent patient have long trumped parents'.

The praying, chanting protesters outside the Florida hospital where this drama plays out are a hint that this is the new front in what began as the abortion war, an effort to translate religious dogma into law under the right-to-life banner.

The feeding tube removed Friday at the order of a Florida state judge is not high medical technology. There are some people, children and adults alike, who may live nearly ordinary lives despite being forced to feed themselves or be fed through a tube because of other medical conditions. The line on removing such a tube is not as bright as removing a patient clearly at the end of life from artificial breathing or a heart machine. Ethical questions surrounding a case like Schiavo's are blurry and difficult, evidenced by the years of waiting and hoping for a miracle that have passed since she collapsed.

This case, headed like a bullet to the Supreme Court, must have most of the justices wishing for a Kevlar vest. The case is a marker for other battles -- about medical assistance in ending a terminally ill life, as in the much-fought Oregon law and a similar proposal working its way through the California Legislature. About the rights of gay couples to assume spousal rights in medical decisions. Most painfully, about abortion.

Federal judges, regarded with contempt by moral conservatives on other issues, are being dragged into another swamp. No decision they make in the Schiavo case and those certain to follow can be the right one.