The Schiavo issue

[Claire]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7254897/?GT1=6305

A link to a story about today's decision.

The measure yesterday passed in a 203-58 vote. 47 Democrats voted for the bill, 53 Democrats and 5 Republicans voted against it.

The bill seems to contradict another law signed by Bush in Texas:

Bush contradicts stance from 1999


The Associated Press


AUSTIN, Texas — The federal law President Bush signed to prolong Terri Schiavo's life in Florida appears to conflict with a Texas law he signed as governor, lawyers said Monday.

The 1999 Advance Directives Act in Texas allows for a patient's surrogate to make end-of-life decisions and spells out how to proceed if a hospital or other health provider disagrees with a decision to maintain or halt life-sustaining treatment.

If a doctor refuses to honor a decision, the case goes before a medical committee. If the committee agrees with the doctor, the guardian or surrogate has 10 days to agree or seek treatment elsewhere.

Thomas Mayo, an associate law professor at Southern Methodist University who helped draft the Texas law, said that if the Schiavo case had happened in Texas, her husband would have been her surrogate decision-maker. Because both he and her doctors were in agreement, life support would have been discontinued.

The Texas law does not include a provision for dealing with conflicts among family members who disagree with the surrogate decision-maker — as has happened in the Schiavo case — although in practice hospital ethics committees would try to resolve such disputes, he said.

The Texas law, Mayo said, tends to keep such cases out of court, allowing life-support decisions to be made privately.