Supporters of Terri Schiavo demonstrate outside Woodside Hospice, in Florida (left). Schiavo with her mother. (AFP, Reuters)

Washington, March 20 (Reuters): President George W. Bush cut short a holiday to return to Washington and be ready to sign a bill that may keep a brain-damaged woman alive in a case pitting Christian conservatives against right-to-die activists.

In a rare Sunday session, the US House of Representatives was to discuss a deal aimed at pushing the Florida case into federal court and restoring the feeding tube that has kept Terri Schiavo alive for the past 15 years.

?The President intends to sign legislation as quickly as possible once it is passed,? White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. ?This is about defending life.?

A deal on the bill, which could be approved by Monday, was forged on Saturday, 24 hours after doctors removed the 41-year-old woman?s feeding tube under a Florida court order.

Bush was to return to Washington from a break at his Texas ranch.

Schiavo?s husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, has long argued ? and has been supported by the courts ? that his wife would not have wanted to live in such a condition.

Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, have persistently appealed, believing their daughter responds to them and could improve with treatment.

Supporters of the bill believe that a judge would ask for the feeding tube to be reinserted so Schiavo did not die before a US federal court review required by the legislation was complete.

?It would be irresponsible not to begin by preserving the individual about whom the case is to be about,? Senator Mel Martinez, a Florida Republican, told a news conference. He compared it to death-penalty cases subject to federal review.

Schiavo has been fed through a stomach tube since a heart attack starved her brain of oxygen in 1990, leaving her in what the courts declared was a persistent vegetative state.

The tube feeding has twice been halted and resumed in the past amid legal wrangles and she was expected to survive for one to two weeks without the tube.

Until now, federal courts have turned the case back to state courts during a bitter seven-year legal battle over Schiavo?s fate.