"I want to live": medicine betrayed by ideology in the political debate over Terri Schiavo.

The public’s view of the political intrusion into the medical care of Theresa Marie Schiavo is well illustrated by two political cartoons. The first, by Tony Auth, reprinted in the Boston Globe shortly after Congress passed a law authorizing intervention by the federal courts, pictures a horde of congressmen charging mindlessly out of the Capitol, all dressed as physicians—one carrying a saw, another an I.V. pole—with the caption, “Coming Soon to a Sickbed Near You . . . [t]he United States Congress.”1 The second, by Tom Toles, published in the Washington Post shortly after the results of the autopsy report were released, pictures an elephant being examined by two physicians.2 The elephant says, “I don’t care what the autopsy says! I was right to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case and I’ll do it again if I get the chance.”3 One physician tells the other, “No hope for recovery.”4 Religious faith by definition does not depend on facts, but law and medicine do. Traditional advice to a young litigator is, “When the facts are against you, argue the law; when the law is against you, argue the facts; and when both are against you, scream like hell.”5 The case of Terri Schiavo was never about the law—the