Schiavo case led to debate unlike any other

NEW YORK — A brain-damaged woman in bed, slowly dying: The quintessential image of the Terri Schiavo case riveted millions of Americans who were deeply moved by its pathos. From any vantage point, the situation was heartbreaking and compelling — testing an ordinary family with dilemmas that everyone fears.

This was no O.J. Simpson-style, must-see celebrity saga, even though VIPs ranging from President Bush to the Rev. Jesse Jackson became involved. The questions raised and the conversations provoked during Schiavo's last weeks were more complicated and more sobering, extending into the most fundamental of topics.

"It was the most profound national discussion we have had about death, about family and about decision-making that I've ever witnessed," said Laurie Zoloth, a professor of medical ethics at Northwestern University. "It has made every American family confront with seriousness of purpose, with passion and with love what the limits of medicine are, what the ends of human life ought to be."

The Rev. George Dean Carter, a Baptist minister and chaplain at a hospice in Lumberton, N.C., said he heard colleagues, friends and others talking daily about the case — some as though the stranger in Florida, glimpsed only in old photographs and oft-repeated video clips, was their new best friend.

But even in Carter's relatively conservative community, views seemed split down the middle — half urging "Let her go in peace," half insisting "Life is life."

He recalled eating lunch at a Lumberton pizza place last week; when the TV news turned to the Schiavo story, "the room seemed captivated."

"You could hear, table to table, it was almost everyone's topic of discussion," he said. "We all saw our sister, our aunt, our mother in that story."

John Green, a political scientist at the University of Akron, said the case was riveting largely because it was so difficult — had Terri Schiavo's physical condition been just a little better, or a little worse, a resolution might have come more easily.

"End-of-life issues are something everyone is going to face at one time or another, and this was a particularly tough case because the people most directly related to Terri disagreed on what to do," Green said. "A lot of Americans, whatever side they came down on, were moved by the pleas from both sides."