8mm
Posted on 01/16/2007 7:26:56 PM PST by fkabuckeyesrule
This week on Proclaim!, Attorney David Gibbs joins us to talk about the sanctity of life. We’ll hear of the battle he fought in an effort to save the life of Terri Schiavo. Don’t miss this important story today on Proclaim! with Dr. Michael Easley.
bump
50,000 reply thread BUMP
Gauger is the program co-host, Eeasley is the Presient of Moody Bible College which does this radio program and Gibbs was Schiavo attorney
Dr. David Gibbs - Terri Schiavo’s Story - 1 (#2816) #2816 – January 15, 2007 – “David Gibbs, III - Terri Schiavo” – 1
[Gauger:] It’s a story that tore the heart out of a nation. As that drama unfolded, one man stood at the center of the media storm. You saw him night after night on CNN, FOX, and every network news channel. This week on Proclaim!, attorney David Gibbs joins us in studio with an insider’s view of the story of Terri Schiavo. This is Proclaim!, with Dr. Michael Easley, and our special guest, David Gibbs. Michael, quite a story.
[Easley:] Jon, this is such a thrill to have David Gibbs III in our studio today, and this story, as you said, not only gripped the heart of a nation, but it divided a nation, and it divided believers into what they thought about life, and the value of life, and what does it really matter, and David, I can’t thank you enough for coming all the way to Chicago to spend some time with Jon and me in studio, to share the story of fighting for dear life.
[Gibbs:] Michael, I’m honored to be here, and I remember back when Bob Schindler originally asked if I could help, and he really had two instructions. He said, “David, do everything that you can, obviously that’s reasonable and right, to save my girl, Terri,” but then he said, “Number two, if they end up killing her, will you make sure everybody knows what happened,” and I believe there is a huge, untold story that has yet to be shown to the world.
[Easley:] When we watch the news, night after night when you were on, David, I remember telling people, “That guy that looks like Clark Kent there, that guy that looks like Superman, he is really playing a super important role,” and I can’t underscore enough, David, how appreciative we are at the Moody Bible Institute for your diligent effort to continue to tell the story and the behind the scenes. We’ve got a lot to talk about, Jon, this week on Proclaim!
[Gauger:] Michael, I think one of the things that needs to be cleared is the fact that there’s an enormous amount of misconception, media spin out there about this story, and David, you know it better than anyone. Where would you start us, if we could just jump right on in and say, “Here’s what really never got said.”
[Gibbs:] Well, I think people probably first and foremost are confused about Terri’s condition. Terms get thrown out like “vegetable.” Well, vegetable doesn’t have any life. Terms get thrown out like “brain dead.”
[Gauger:] Brain dead is what we heard.
[Gibbs:] And you understand, if something’s dead, it makes no sense to go hook machines up to keep a corpse functioning. If the soul has left the body, there’s no point to that, and yet what people don’t realize is Terri wasn’t even in any respect a vegetable, or brain dead. She was a disabled woman. She was as alive as any person listening to my voice. Her heart worked. Her lungs worked. Her body functioned. There was no disease, no cancer, or Alzheimer’s in her system, ending her life. Terri Schiavo was alive, and so I think a lot of people want to view this as an end of life case. Tragically it wasn’t. It was a decision to end a life.
[Gauger:] We had some perspectives shared with us as we prepared for this week of broadcasts. Visiting with Bob and Mary Schindler, Terri’s parents, and her mother Mary made a fascinating assessment.
[M. Schindler:] What people don’t realize, and we keep saying it over and over, Terri was talking in 1991. She was being rehabilitated down in Bradenton. After Michael received his award from the medical malpractice trial, everything stopped. That was the end of ’92, the beginning of ’93. Now if you put somebody in a bed, and you don’t move them, you don’t take them out, you don’t do anything with them at all, you don’t move their arms, you don’t move their legs, they are going to deteriorate. Terri was definitely brain damaged, but she needed rehabilitation. Terri could definitely have talked. I don’t know how far she could have gone, but Terri needed help, and he didn’t give her any help. Fifteen years, he let her lay in a bed.
[Easley:] David, the length of that is just amazing. I don’t think the American public knew how long this went on. You saw Terri many times in those rehab situations.
[Gibbs:] I was in the room with Terri. It was greatly limited, Michael, as to who’d they let in. FOX wasn’t allowed in, CNN. They kept the media away, and I believe they didn’t want America to see how alive Terri was. The first time I went in the room with Mary Schindler to see her daughter, I’m waiting to see is Terri hooked up to tubes or wires, is her nurse there, or what is necessary, and Terri is sitting in a La–Z–Boy chair by herself, alone in the room.
At this point, she’s not getting any food and water, so nothing is hooked up to her whatsoever, and she looked just wonderful sitting there, and as we looked up to her, I wondered, “Well, does she have any responsiveness? Is she going to, in any way, know we’re here,” and I watched this lady literally squeal and lunge forward out of her chair as her mother approached her, and as her mother, Mary, would reach over and kiss her on the cheek, and say, “Terri, I’m here to introduce you to some new friends,” I watched Terri Schiavo turn and kiss her mother back. Not as good as we would in controlling her mouth, but almost like a nibble on the cheek or the chin, and then Mary said, “Now I want you to show Mr. Gibbs what you can do,” and she began – Mary Schindler was just a stay at home mom.
She had no physical therapy training, but as she would rub her daughter’s cheek, she’d say, “Terri, now I want you to say, ‘I,’” and I watched Terri Schiavo respond, and obey her mom, and “I,” and “Terri, I need you to say, ‘Love,’” and Terri would get the L, “La,” and then she’d say, “Now Terri, let’s work on the ‘U,’” and Terri never got the U’s, but Michael, I watched this lady interact, recognize different people. The response was completely different to her dad. He would come up, he’d have a mustache and a little bit of a beard on his chin, and he would say, “Terri, this is your dad. I’m fighting for you. I’m gonna come give you a kiss,” and she would purse up, and make this lemon face, and turn her face away, and giggle, like, “Dad, I’m gonna avoid the kiss,” and then she’d turn back and accept it, and I watched this lady interact with her family.
Mary Schindler would leave the room – always disconcerted me – big tears would run down Terri’s cheek. Terri was brain injured. She was disabled. I understood that, but here was a lady that all she needed to stay alive was food and water. She was recognizing people. She seemed to love and appreciate her family. She was saying small words, and this is being literally isolated, or warehoused in a hospice surrounded by death.
[Gauger:] Attorney David Gibbs joining us in studio this week, the man who was the lead legal counsel for Terri Schiavo, the girl that was so much in the news recently. Michael, what a story.
[Easley:] Now David, there’s folks listening and they’re saying, “Well, how do we know what she was thinking? You said she’s brain damaged, but maybe she wanted to die. Maybe it was no big deal. Why should we fight so tenaciously to hang onto this person who is injured, who is disabled in some form? What would you say?
[Gibbs:] Well, the whole case hung on really two issues. Number one, Terri’s physical condition, and I don’t believe she was a vegetable. I believe she was very much alive, but then the second component, Michael, was what were Terri’s wishes? What would she want? Now please understand there’s a legal side, and then a scriptural side. What’s the right thing to do, but legally, people can decide to not accept food and water. In this case, the troubling component is there was nothing in writing. Terri had never, in any way, demonstrated her wishes, and her husband had done some flip flopping. He originally said, “Do everything you can to keep her alive.”
He sued doctors and promised a jury, “I’ll care for my wife the rest of my life,” and received a multimillion dollar verdict, and so then all of a sudden the money comes in, he gets a new girlfriend, and now he decides Terri wouldn’t really want to live like this, and so I don’t believe this case was about Terri’s wishes. I believe this case was about the husband’s wishes, and tragically, a judge in Florida that never went to see Terri agreed, based on her “low quality of life,” we could allow her to die a death that would be a crime if done to a dog, a death that would never be allowed to a terrorist – it would violate international law – a death that our Constitution would not allow for a convicted killer, that’s what Terri had to undergo.
[Easley:] You’ve mentioned before, David – I don’t want you to go into too much detail, but you’ve mentioned before what it was like to watch her die. Can you give our listeners just a little picture of that experience, because again, America’s been so removed from the cruel way that Terri’s life ended.
[Gauger:] We were told it was very peaceful, and there was no suffering.
[Gibbs:] Michael, I was in the room with Terri Schiavo the last time her mother would see her alive, and there’s some images that forever get indelibly scarred in your mind. I walked in, and her breathing has flipped into this death pant as she’s battling for life, and I had seen her. People saw her image on television. She was a reasonably attractive girl for her disability. She had kept herself well, and I looked in, and all the pulp, all the flesh had drawn in on her skull. It literally looked like you had stretched a plastic bag over her skeleton –
[Easley:] Like a POW.
[Gibbs:] Oh, big circles under her eyes. I had seen dry skin, I had seen dried lips. I’d never seen a peeling tongue. I’d never seen the roof of a mouth literally coming in on itself, and the death occurs when the internal organs literally swell from lack of water, and your heart doesn’t have a heart attack. Your heart explodes. Terri Schiavo, interestingly, they said she was a vegetable, but they had heavy duty morphine on her because of the incredible pain she was going through, and you stand there and watch a mother sob, and pray over her daughter with an armed police officer behind you, to make sure that this mom doesn’t do what’s in the instinct of every mother, which is to reach over, and to help your daughter.
[Easley:] You mentioned that we wouldn’t let someone treat an animal that way in this country, and yet this raises the question, David, you mentioned earlier the legal side and the biblical side. God cares about life.
[Gibbs:] God cares about every life, and I think we really, in the Terri Schiavo case, Michael, see a clash of world views. If we believe that evolution occurred, and everything’s just a big cosmic accident, and the strong survive, and the weak have to be thrown away, or do we indeed believe what the Word of God clearly teaches, that God is the giver of life, that God is the allower of any disability, and that God, and God alone, should be the One to end life.
[Easley:] I know many of our friends would say God allowed disability, yet there is a sense, which we are in a fallen world, we’re in a fallen structure, and illness and disease are results of that fall, but even more to the point, we are the image bearer. There’s no other creation that bears the very image of Jesus Christ.
[Gibbs:] We are made clearly in the image of God, and we’re clearly set up to be above the animals, and when you look at some of the insanity, people become more concerned, and I believe animals should be treated with respect. My children love animals, but we look at a society right now that more values the protection of an animal than an innocent, disabled woman.
[Gauger:] And surely God cannot be pleased, Michael, with such a twisted value system.
[Easley:] This is a sober place to stop, Jon, but we need to remind all of our friends and the network of Proclaim! listeners, this country has lost its soul, and we who love Christ, who love His Word, have an obligation to serve Him well, to stay rooted to the Scripture, which is our hope and prayer. This week on Proclaim!, a great set of interviews with David Gibbs III. Join us again tomorrow as we continue our conversation with David.
[Gauger:] And meanwhile, if you would like to explore this story of Terri Schiavo further, we commend to you David Gibbs’ new book, Fighting For Dear Life. It’s available at our website, proclaim.mbn.org. David, of course, was there. He witnessed what the media did not see or report, that Terri was not a vegetable. David writes, “She laughed, cried and responded to verbal commands, and yes, her life was very much worth saving.”
The complete story in Fighting for Dear Life, our gift to you as you support Proclaim! online at proclaim.mbn.org or you can call in that gift at 1–888–PROCLAIM, that’s 888–776–2524, and for your generous gift to this ministry, we’ll send you a copy of David Gibbs’ Fighting for Dear Life: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo, and What it Means for All of Us. Well, David returns to the studio tomorrow along with Michael Easley. I’m Jon Gauger. See you then on Proclaim!
Dr. David Gibbs - Terri Schiavo's Story - 2 (#2817) #2817 – January 16, 2007 – “David Gibbs, III - Terri Schiavo” – 2
[Easley:] You remember Terri Schiavo? March 31, 2005, she died. We were told she was brain dead. We were told there was no hope for her life. Her father, Bob Schindler, has quite a different story.
[B. Schindler:] It was tantamount, and I made the analogy, it would be almost like if you were to hit a pedestrian with your car, and after you hit them, they’d be laying on the side of the road, and rather than get that person any kind of medical assistance, you just stand there and watch them, and you watch them wither away, and eventually they would die, and that’s what happened to Terri. The whole thing was a tragedy.
[Gauger:] A tragedy you saw on the news night after night, but making sense of it, especially with all the media spin is maybe not such an easy task. Well, joining us all this week in studio here on Proclaim!, the lead counsel for Terri Schiavo, David Gibbs III, of the Christian Law Association. Welcome back to Proclaim!, David.
[Gibbs:] Jon, I’m honored to be with you.
[Gauger:] Well David, why is it that so much of the American public did not see her the way Bob Schindler, her dad, just portrayed it?
[Gibbs:] Well, number one, they were banned from the room. Terri Schiavo was warehoused in a hospice, and there were court orders and police stationed to keep media out, to keep others out. The only reason I was allowed in is I was an attorney on the case, but you need to recognize there was multiple checkpoints, and I.D. checks, and it was extremely difficult, and then you were completely prohibited by court order. You could go to jail if you took a picture, or video, or anything like that of Terri Schiavo, because they clearly didn’t want the image of how alive Terri was, and how interactive she was to get to the world, and as Bob indicated, the insanity of someone needing help, in Terri’s case, needing water to remain alive, and being told, as a parent, you have to stand there and just watch her die. It’s really amazing Bob and Mary Schindler didn’t lose their mind going through the pain of that.
[Easley:] David, we talked before about the fact that there were two very willing providers, healthcare providers for Terri. The public hears about the costs, and all this. There were not only adequate resources, but there were two people willing to care for her day and night.
[Gibbs:] One of the things that we did, Michael, in the case, is we clearly documented in a letter to Michael, basically this deal. Any terms, any conditions. If there’s money, you can have it. If there’s money in the future, you can have it. If you want a divorce, you can have it. If you want to stay married, you can have it. If you want to visit her, you can visit her. If you don’t want to visit her, that’s fine. Whatever you want, Michael, but please just don’t kill our daughter, and the Schindlers on any terms and conditions, would have gladly accepted the burden, and people say, “Well, how would they do that?” Many folks from across the nation had already volunteered their help and said, “We will do everything we can,” but they were parents, and they, in their heart, would’ve traded places with Terri in a second if they could.
[Easley:] As would you or I, or Jon, for any of our kids, and this again is unfortunate that the media did not pick up on this, or play this angle, was that this is a child, in a sense. These are parents who love their daughter, who would do anything for their daughter, and oh, by the way, we’re not even going to bother you with the cost. We’ll take care of this. We think of people being decaying, and disabled, and dying these lonely, hard deaths. There was exceptional healthcare for this young lady.
[Gibbs:] What I never understood was the unkindness of not allowing the Schindlers to care for their own daughter.
[Gauger:] That’s what most Americans, I think now struggle with.
[Gibbs:] If Michael Schiavo, the husband, really believed that Terri didn’t have any quality of life, or if he even believed she was a vegetable, how can you look at a mother, how can you look at a father and say, “I am going to force you to watch your daughter die,” and in Terri’s case, thirteen days where you’re slowly dehydrated, and you can walk in the room, but there will be an armed police to make sure that you in no way provide any help to your daughter.” I don’t understand the complete lack of kindness, even if Michael Schiavo disagrees with the parents. If he says, “Terri ain’t gonna get any better. She doesn’t have any quality of life,” for him to put her family through that never made any sense to me.
[Gauger:] That’s attorney David Gibbs joining us in studio all this week on Proclaim!
[Easley:] David, there has been some research done on some of the neuropathologies and issues that go on in brain damaged people. We can’t know exactly what goes on in a person’s mind who is brain injured, but you had some interesting insights into what you have learned and observed. How would you comment to someone who said, “Well David, she’s brain dead. She’s brain injured. What’s the difference? Maybe she wants to die.” How do you respond to that?
[Gibbs:] Well, what you have with the brain is the marvel of God as the Creator, because I think we’re only beginning to discover just the beauty of what He has put within our skeleton. The brain, the old thinking in medicine was that if it had an injury, it was like a computer hard drive. It was shot. It had to be replaced, and that would end a person’s life.
The new thinking is that the brain is much more like the internet, that if a portion of it goes down, that it will actually reconnect and create connectivity, and function, and even move function to different parts of the brain, and so the leading thinking is that some medicines, and some therapy, and other things can allow severely brain injured people to lead very productive lives, and dramatically improve, and so Bob and Mary Schindler weren’t asking for an indefinite life for Terri Schiavo. They understood that at some point, she would step into eternity, but what they were asking for is please just give us some more time. We think she’ll continue to improve, and clearly, while she’s alive, and there’s no disease in her body, we want to protect the life of our daughter.
[Gauger:] There is recent precedent to suggest this dialogue is more than theory. In the book, David, that you have put together, Fighting for Dear Life, you recount the story of Kate Adamson. Maybe you could summarize that story, and what came out of it.
[Gibbs:] Kate was a remarkable lady that came to help in the Terri Schiavo case. Her husband was an attorney in California, and Kate went through an experience like Terri Schiavo. She had a severe medical situation. She was deemed a vegetable, non-responsive. Her husband was told, “You need to let her go. Her days are gone,” and yet what Kate Adamson will say is the only difference between me and Terri Schiavo is I had a husband who wouldn’t give up on me, and he gave up his practice of law, and he battled, and Kate Adamson now travels the nation, and speaks, and she talks about the pain, and the horror of having the feeding tube removed, and the feelings of hunger, and people talking about her, and desperately trying to communicate, but she can’t, and yet she’s feeling all of this, and she’s a powerful voice for those disabled people, whether they’re military veterans, or other people in accidents that are brain injured. They are feeling and hearing a lot more than many people think.
[Easley:] You recount some of the dialogue in the book, Fighting for Dear Life. She did an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor, and Bill says, “So you were feeling pain when they removed your tube?” Kate says, “Oh yes, absolutely. To say that especially when Michael Schiavo, on national TV, mentioned that it’s a pretty painless thing to have the feeding tube removed, it is the exact opposite. It was sheer torture.”
[Gibbs:] And that’s from a woman who went through the experience, but her husband didn’t give up, and people even accused him of being delusional, saying, “Well, your wife isn’t moving.” He said, “No, I think her finger’s twitching. I think she’s responding to me,” and what they showed, Jon, in these brain injured situations, is if they can sense the love of family, if they can sense normalcy, if they can sense a desire that you have for them to get well, and to recover, that you can see amazingly miraculous things occur, but when you get them warehoused, like Terri was in a hospice surrounded by death, when you get them isolated – there were court hearings whether we could cut the blinds to let light into her room. When you get them de-socialized, where they’re not around people, that that is the worst of circumstances, and under those tremendously adverse circumstances, Terri Schiavo was doing remarkably well.
[Easley:] I remember back in college, a series that Francis Schaeffer put together, Whatever Happened to the Human Race. It was featuring a guy at the time named C. Everett Koop, before he became surgeon general, and I remember one of the videos I watched during my college years of Dr. Koop interviewing a bunch of profoundly disabled adults around a campfire on a beach, and two, a man and woman asked them, given the chance to live or to die, what would be your preference, and all of them, David, saying, “We wanna live,” and who are we? What have we become as a culture that can with the stroke of a judicial pen, end a life?
[Gibbs:] Well Michael, it’s the slippery slope, because when you start making the determination of who should live, or who should die, the question always enters in now, by what standard do you make that decision? Terri Schiavo was a 41 year old, disabled woman, and it was decided that there was no quality of life, and her life could be ended with the full blessing of a court, and yet where does that go? Our founding fathers understood that if you don’t protect innocent life, you have no other liberty; that truly all liberty emanates from the protection of life. They had come from the English regime, where the King could just declare, “Off with your head,” or “I don’t like you,” or “You’re a rival,” and clearly in that, it was understood that the protection of life would be the basis in this new country by which all of our other cherished liberties would be protected.
[Gauger:] Michael, a life lesson from Terri’s life. For Christians, where do we go with all this?
[Easley:] Jon, I’m thinking so many different directions right now. I’m coming back to a passage where James says, “Our life is a vapor,” in James 4:14. How quickly this life dissipates, and here we are, we usually bring a diet of exposition on this program called Proclaim!, but Jon, you and I felt so compelled that we need to remind people of this story, that God created man in His image. We are image bearers of Jesus Christ. I have in my mind a sanctified picture of the Lord Jesus Christ on His hands and knees, making a sand Adam, forming Adam with His own hands, breathing life into his soul, giving him breath, and He creates a living being, and Jesus walked with Adam in the cool of the day in the garden. There was an intimacy of the God man, with His created Adam, and we have soiled, and trampled, and vilified this thing called life. God help us, as believers, to stand tall, to stand gently, and firmly to remind people life is a gift of God, and we’re not to tamper with it, or take it when it’s in our power.
[Gauger:] Let me read just an excerpt here from A Life Worth Living. This, a chapter from attorney Gibbs’ book on this Terri Schiavo story called Fighting for Dear Life. David says, “The question remains how might you and I handle a life and death decision should God place a severely disabled spouse, daughter, son or parent into our lives? We have to be very careful when we say disabled people can’t contribute to society. Think about this, Terri touched the world because her parents were willing to fight for her life. If they hadn’t, if they had said, ‘Oh well, these bad things happen. We’ll just let her go,’ we never would’ve heard of Terri. Because of their commitment, Terri Schiavo had a far greater impact than many people who can speak or walk. She touched the nation and the world with her life. I’d say that’s a life worth living.” Well, David tells the untold story of Terri Schiavo in Fighting for Dear Life, and we’ll send you out a copy for your gift of any amount in support of Proclaim! online at proclaim.mbn.org, or call in your gift to 1–888–PROCLAIM. For Michael Easley, our guest, David Gibbs, I am Jon Gauger, inviting you back tomorrow as our story unfolds Proclaim!
Thanks, sorry I spelled your name wrong.
8mm
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.