The Terri Schiavo case is back in the news. Schiavo is the 40-year-old woman in Florida whose right to live and die is being fought over in the courts. She has been in a vegetative-like state for 13 years.

Today's news is that a Florida judge struck down the state law, dubbed Terri's law, that:

permits the governor to suspend the removal of a feeding tube from patients (a) who do not have a written advance directive instructing that they not be nourished and (b) whose families disagree with the decision to dehydrate.

So basically, the law gives one person, the governor of Florida [in this case Jeb Bush] the right to override the decision made by the legal guardian [in this case Michael Schiavo] to stop tube feeding a patient [Schiavo's wife, Terri], because her parents disagree with his decision.

Laws Were Made to Be Broken

It's a horrible law. Why in the world should a state governor who knows nothing about you or your family be able to step in and override a medical decision you made? There will almost always be one family member that doesn't want to stop medical treatment, no matter how hopeless the case is. That is why the courts give guardianship to one person, and that person is rightly the spouse, if the patient is married. Terri Schiavo's parents don't like the court rulings that have maintained Michael Schiavo's status as guardian, so the Florida legislature stepped in and basically wrote a law just for them.

That is absolutely, unabashedly wrong, as the judge noted. Michael Schiavo is the only one who has the legal right to make decisions for his wife. And in 1998 he made a decision to remove her feeding tube. Since then, he's been in a court battle with her parents. He says that Terri told him that she wouldn't want to be kept alive artificially. Unfortunately, Terri didn't put it in writing, so only Michael knows whether or not he's telling the truth.

Terri's parents think he's not. First, they claim that he has been denying Terri rehabilitation and medical treatments, including antibiotics. Second, they claim Terri never said anything about end-of-life issues. But with all due respect to Terri's parents, they have no idea what Terri and her husband did and didn't discuss privately.

And that's why spouses are each other's legal guardians, by default, in cases like this. Our spouses are the people we have *chosen* to make all of life's major decisions with. Our parents, god love 'em, merely gave us life in the first place. Okay, so that's a pretty big, sometimes accidental, deal. But once we marry, they don't have a legal right to make decisions for us when we're incapacitated.