Beth was fourteen years old and in her first year at the public high school, a long-legged blond girl just beginning to receive phone calls from boys who already seemed to anticipate her turning sixteen, an age Rick and Janine (too long ago! what were they thinking?) had deemed old enough to date. That was when Janine first heard about Terri Schiavo, a woman who, at the age of twenty-six, the very flower of her life, collapsed in the hallway of her St. Petersburg home and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where she was intubated and ventilated and pronounced comatose. Janine did not know about this woman until she had been in a coma for more than a decade, when the fight between her parents and her husband made national news. Her husband had not wanted to take her off life support (she could breathe on her own), but to remove her feeding and hydration tube, essentially starving and dehydrating her to death. Her parents, devout Catholics who believed it was wrong to interfere with God’s will, opposed him.

Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband, and the lawyers and politicians and even the doctors, who stood against Terri’s parents and against God, seemed to represent something about the world Janine’s daughters would be growing into. A world in which, instead of praising God for sparing his wife’s life and giving him the opportunity to care for her alongside her devoted parents, a man might kill her with the full participation and support of a hospital staff and court of law. A world in which a life only counted if it looked, on the outside, like everyone else’s. Janine could not imagine releasing either of her sweet girls, still as tender and uncertain as kittens, into such a world.

Janine had never been a political person. She voted in presidential elections and kept the evening news on while she made dinner, but she was aware that most of her ideas about politics came from other people, namely Rick. The Schiavo case was different. Unlike taxes or gun control or war or even abortion, issues that were merely theoretical in Janine’s life, this seemed wholly within her realm of experience and power of imagination. It was a case that struck at the very heart of what people meant when they told you that you were a mother for your child’s entire life, that you would protect them always, no matter what. Terri’s openmouthed, beatific smile (was it a smile?), her head lolling against a wheelchair’s cushioned neck support, was an image that flashed across every television screen while the likes of Jesse Jackson and Jeb Bush and lawyers from the ACLU talked on and on in the background.