Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul were asked about the controversy seven years ago in Florida surrounding Terri Schiavo, the woman in a persistent vegetative state who became the center of a legal and political battle, when her husband sought to have her feeding tube and other life-support measures discontinued.
Santorum, who very actively supported and pushed through legislation to force a judicial intervention in the case, sough to correct the premise of the question. “I did not call for Congressional intervention. I called for a judicial hearing by an impartial judge at the federal level,” he said, in a case where the parents and the husband were on different sides of an issue, and where the parents were constituents of his in Pennsylvania.
Gingrich contrasted the Schiavo case with the legal lengths that are extended for murderers on Death Row. He said that in this case, the husband wanted to let her die, and the parents wanted to let her live. “Now it strikes me as having a bias in favor life, and at least going to a federal hearing, which would be automatic if it was a criminal on death row,” he said.
Ron Paul, the only physician on stage, took a step back and said that he would prefer to have these cases resolved at the state level — but also gave people a word of caution, saying he had seen similar cases (though not as drastic) in his medical profession: “I find it so unfortunate. That situation doesn’t come up very often. It should teach us all a lesson to have living wills, or have a good conversation with our spouse.”
