WASHINGTON -- As Texas governor, George W. Bush signed a law that allows hospitals to pull the plug on critically ill patients despite family objections - the kind of court-authorized move the president and fellow Republicans are challenging in the Terri Schiavo case.

Just last Tuesday, the Texas law resulted in what some call a U.S. first, when a Houston hospital cut off life support for a badly deformed 6-month-old baby after his mother lost a court challenge. The baby died almost immediately.

Democrats and even some medical ethicists are citing the 1999 Texas law to charge that Bush's position in the Schiavo case is hypocritical compared to the stance he took as governor.

"The Texas statute that Bush signed authorized the ending of the life, even over the parents' protest. And what he's doing here is saying, 'The parents are protesting. You shouldn't stop [treatment],'" said John Paris, a noted medical ethicist at Boston College.

A hospital association lawyer who helped draft the Texas law said it would have allowed for the removal of Schiavo's feeding tube if all legal challenges had been exhausted because the Texas law would make her husband the primary decisionmaker.

The White House said yesterday that Bush's position is consistent, and that the Texas bill focused on expanding the rights of the critically ill and their families to prevent hospitals and doctors from denying life-saving treatment.

Bush spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that Bush vetoed 1997 legislation that would have put into law Texas hospital policies that gave families virtually no protections and as little as 72 hours to find alternate care after a hospital decided to stop treatment.

Under the 1999 law, another White House official said, Bush expanded that time to 10 days and authorized family members to seek extensions in court but acknowledge that if the challenges fell short, "under the legislation, the hospital still could authorize the end of life."

In Texas, Bush's position also had the backing of Texas Right to Life, whose national headquarters, along with other Christian conservatives that make up a key part of the Republican base, has taken up the fight to prolong Schiavo's life.

Burke Balch, director of the Powell Center for Medical Ethics at National Right to Life Committee in Washington, said he represented the Texas chapter in more than two dozen negotiating sessions over the 1999 bill.

He acknowledged that the legislation could allow a hospital to move to end a patient's life over the family's wishes but denied that was inconsistent with Bush's positions now, or his own group's as well.

"Does this mean that we or Gov. Bush are hypocrites because we supported that law? The answer is, it was the best we could achieve at the time, better than the existing state of the law. It's not what we wanted to achieve, it's not the right decision. But when we have the ability to change the law to be more protective, certainly we would do that," Balch said.

Elizabeth Sjoberg, an associate general counsel with the Texas Hospital Association, helped draft the 1999 law, and said it added various procedures to ensure that a patients' final wishes regarding care were carried out, while still protecting the hospital if it determined that care should be stopped for terminal or irreversibly ill patients.