Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is now saying “case closed” in light of the autopsy results in the case of Terri Schiavo and asserting that he never made a diagnosis on this issue.
That contention will come as news to many who supported Schiavo being kept connected to a feeding tube. They had pointed to Frist’s comments based on viewing a videotape of Schiavo as important, since Frist was a surgeon. It should also come as news to talk show hosts who mentioned his comments to bolster their cases. And it will come as news to those who opposed Congress and the White House getting involved in the Schiavo case since they argued at the time that Frist had no way of passing judgment on a patient by just looking at video footage.
But now, according to the Washington Post, Frist seems to want to put as as much distance between him and his comments at the time as Wendy’s would like to put between its restaurants and advertisements for finger food:
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, a surgeon who had questioned Terri Schiavo’s diagnosis during the intense national debate on whether to remove her feeding tube, said the autopsy documenting her severe brain damage brings “a very sad chapter to a close.”
“She had devastating brain damage, and with that the chapter is closed,” Frist said Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America.”
Frist, R-Tenn., said he never made his own diagnosis but did argue there wasn’t enough information about Schiavo’s condition to justify allowing her husband to remove her feeding tube against her parents’ wishes.“I raised the question, ‘Is she in a persistent vegetative state or not?’ I never made the diagnosis, never said that she was not. I did say that certain tests should be performed to determine that before starving her to death,” Frist said in the interview.
That’s not precisely the way his comments were being described at the time by those who were arguing her feeding tube should stay connected.
However, the Washington Post also offers this refresher on what what was said:
Debating the emergency legislation on the Senate floor, Frist questioned the diagnosis of the court-appointed doctors, referring to video footage provided by her family that seemed to show Schiavo responding to people around her.
“I question it based on a review of the video footage. … And that footage, to me, depicted something very different than persistent vegetative state,” Frist said at the time.
That’s not judgement akin to a diagnosis? It WAS and was touted as such.
The autopsy results report released yesterday concluded Schiavo died of irreversible brain damage, her brain having horribly shrunken, and that there was no abuse as those opposing Schiavo’s husband Michael and some talk show hosts had claimed. Frist said on CBS:””The diagnosis they made is exactly right. It’s the pathology, I’ll respect that. I think it’s time to move on.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.