I think the divide is more between people who accepted the doctors' verdict and people who wanted Terri to live, based on the assumption that the doctors were wrong. It's a divide between reason and emotion, a divide between accepting the world and a certain idealism. Unfortunately it appears to be an idealism that required a bad guy.
Thus a husband who for all we know merely insisted that his wives wishes be followed was accused of murdering his wife and having mistreated her when she was still alive and aware.
An article on Foxnews.com appears to describe the two sides fairly well, and I quote:
"An attorney for Michael Schiavo announced earlier this week that there would be an autopsy of Terri's body, to settle once and for all questions over her physical state as well as some recent allegations that Michael Schiavo abused and attempted to kill his wife after she was hospitalized in 1990.
The Schindlers have not objected to the autopsy; they hope the findings will prove their daughter was not in a persistent vegetative state as has been diagnosed by numerous doctors. They and their supporters have said, against all known medical evidence, that Schiavo was able to communicate and respond. In one emergency legal filing last week, they claimed she had said she wanted to live."
Michael Schiavo (I always got the spelling wrong, I think) still believes that making the facts more known would somehow persuade his opponents to believe him and the doctors, while the Schindlers are still arguing against the findings of the doctors.
Well, I don't believe that the autopsy will convince anybody. We have all seen the scans of Terri's brain and read the opinions of her doctors and other medical professionals. At least we all had access to them and could have read them. We have believed of them what we wanted to believe. And whoever didn't want to believe that the scans showed that Terri's brain was almost completely gone and that she was unconscious and unaware and could not have been recovered, will still not believe it after the autopsy. The only point of the autopsy seems to be to avoid having people to take its absence as another "proof" for the great evils of Michael Schiavo.
As for the question of whether her parents should have been her guardians rather than her husband, there seems to be some confusion regarding why a guardian even came into it. It was to make Terri's wishes known to the hospital so that Terri could die or not, depending on what she would have wanted. And given that her husband accepted what the doctors said while her parents still don't, I'm afraid it seems that Michael was probably better suited to make the decision. A human life should not end as a media spectacle, and her parents had no right to make it one. (And in fact they seemed to have tried to convince their supporters to keep a lower profile.)
"President Bush opened a press conference by offering his condolences to Schiavo's "families," perhaps an intentional departure from other lawmakers' statements that exclude mention of her husband, Michael."
I must thank President Bush for being including both "families" of Terri's in his condolences. Intentionally excluding the dead woman's husband is despicable,
"His heartless cruelty continued until the end,"
These were Terri's parents comment when Michael wanted to be alone with his wife at the end. Michael's whereabouts are now unknown.
In only a few weeks we have now managed to make him fear for his life, just because his wife's wish as told by him happened to be not what we would have hoped for, even when we must have known that she could not have recovered. We blame him for continuing his life, while we all lived ours in the last ten years, we call him a murderer because we had the arrogance of claiming that what the courts believed was Terri's wish was really Michael's lie.
We must be really proud of ourselves as a society.
