Posted on 03/23/2025 11:23:41 PM PDT by Morgana
This month — March 30th — will mark 20 years since Terri Schindler Schiavo was cruelly killed, deprived of food and water for 13 days until she finally succumbed to dehydration and starvation. It was one of the most controversial bioethics issues to arise since Roe v. Wade, in what many deemed a victory for supposed “medical choice.” Now, two decades later, a pair of bioethicists is revisiting Terri’s death, and argued that while they believe killing her was the right decision, it also ended up leading to the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022.
The Hastings Center is a bioethics research institute in New York, and on its blog, Arthur Caplan and Dominic Sisti made the outlandish claim about Schiavo. And while the Hastings Center claims to be non-partisan, Caplan, at least, is certainly biased on this issue. He has argued that EMTALA requires hospitals to commit abortions, has called for Catholic hospitals to be defunded while Planned Parenthood receives taxpayer dollars, and believes children with disabilities should be denied organ transplants.
In their op-ed, Caplan and Sisti play fast and loose with the facts surrounding Terri’s death, as well as her condition.
While she needed to be fed through a tube, she could breathe without assistance, was not sick or dying, and had no condition that would lead to her imminent death. Terri was severely disabled, but numerous doctors said there was the possibility of improvement, particularly with access to therapy.
Fighting for death
She had been receiving rehabilitative services at first, which led her to be able to speak a few words, but her husband, Michael Schiavo, stopped providing those services after 1991. Though Terri had been predicted to live a normal life span, Schiavo eventually met and moved in with another woman and fathered children with her, only then ‘remembering’ that Terri said she wouldn’t have wanted to live with such a disability.
Despite her parents’ objections and willingness to care for her themselves, Schiavo fought to have his wife slowly and torturously killed — and he didn’t bother to mandate that she receive any comfort care whatsoever.
As her brother, Bobby Schindler, has recounted:
These are the hard facts my family and I will have to live with for the rest of my life: After almost two weeks without food or water, my sister’s lips were horribly cracked, to the point where they were blistering. Her skin became jaundiced with areas that turned different shades of blue. Her skin became markedly dehydrated from the lack of water. Terri’s breathing became rapid and uncontrollable, as if she was outside sprinting.
Her moaning, at times, was raucous, which indicated to us the insufferable pain she was experiencing.
Terri’s face became skeletal, with blood pooling in her deeply sunken eyes and her teeth protruding forward. Even as I write this, I can never properly describe the nightmare of having to watch my sister have to die this way.
What will be forever seared in my memory is the look of utter horror on my sister’s face when my family visited her just after she died.
Instead of acknowledging how horrific her death at the hands of her husband was, Caplan and Sisti lionize him as the person “who knew her best” and had the “authority” to fight for her “values.” (More facts about Terri’s life, and cruel death, can be read here.)
Schiavo’s death ’emboldened’ the pro-life movement
Yet for Caplan and Sisti, Terri’s death is notable today solely because, they claim, it “emboldened” the pro-life movement, which in turn, led to the fall of Roe in the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision.
In retrospect, Schiavo launched a new, emboldened prolife movement, one that would eventually lead to conservative rule in state houses across the U.S. and the election, twice, of Donald Trump.
The seeding of a new ultraconservative judiciary would support a strategic assault on medical privacy that would eventually lead to the end of legal abortion protection in Dobbs.
Schiavo established a dangerous precedent in which politicians determined medical care, not patients and not their spouses.
Of course, the pro-life movement launched decades before 2005; the National Right to Life Committee, for example, was formed in 1967, while the term “pro-life” had been used since Roe was instituted in 1973.
The pair furthermore talk about the need to “fight to honor Terri’s values in death,” which is even more grotesque, considering her death was the result of the removal of nutrition and hydration from a vulnerable person with disabilities — not removing someone from life support who was artificially being kept alive.
Furthermore, the notion of a more powerful person taking the life of a more vulnerable human being is entirely reminiscent of abortion. No one should have the right to take the life of another person, regardless of the circumstances.
She was allegedly found unconscious by her husband and brought to the hospital.
Her husband sued for and received a multi-million dollar settlement for her long term care. I believe the claim was injury from a medication she was taking.
Within a few years, he had hooked up with another gal, had kids with her, and then suddenly recalled she didn’t want to live this way (after pocketing the money, of course).
He had the courts kill her.
Whole thing stank to high heaven.
Even her Bishop would not go to see her. He did nothing to help her or her family in any way.
Jeb and his brother did nothing and they could have.
I lived day after day on these Terri threads.
I just thought about these things a couple of days ago, and I came to the conclusion that President Trump would have done something to save her.
What really bothered me was the way they killed her.
I would not kill any animal that way.
+++++++++++
This culture of ours is really sick. I 100% agree that doing this to an animal would be unthinkable. You would do the humane thing of course and relieve the pet from further suffering. Letting a human being suffer and die this way? Incomprehensible, but with the left, just another day advancing their ghoulish agenda. Certainly one of the crimes committed here. One man’s opinion.
Was this was when Jeb Bush fiddled away his previous sympathy for Terri?
Just as we no longer need a look at Jeb, his legacy endures.
Jeb! is hilarious to watch in action
Jeb allowed Judge Greer to commandeer the police to prevent anything that would save Terri, or give her comfort, in any way. He let a Civil Court judge usurp the control of the executive over the Executive Branch. Jeb and W both were COWARDS.
If I found a family member who was unconscious I would call 911. They would get to the house sooner than I could carry someone to a vehicle and drive to the hospital, and perhaps give some form of life support. They are much more knowledgeable than I. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to see some evidence of abuse?
Or at least Trump would let her die with dignity, relieve her pain, put her on IV and nutrients. Letting her die of starvation and dehydration is immoral and inhumane. Murders imho.
While she lay there dying of dehydration, it was reported that the husband placed fresh flowers with water in a vase on her window sill, just out of her reach, which she had to look at as she died of thirst.
The evil!
There are those who project that it's "ours". It's theirs and only ours if we accept it.
Why do I get the sense that “Bioethics” dehumanizes people?
Yes, the cold hearted jerk husband wanted her dead because he had a financial interest in her death and a girl friend. Jeb Bush was a chicken heart and would not rescue her. Sorry, but as a family lawyer, I know that parents are more in tune with a person than their spouse.
If Jeb Bush had stepped up he would’ve become president because he would have stood for something other than tippy toes.
So it’s not just religious conservatives who make the connection. Good to know.
Bioethicists = death cult.
She was born because God wanted her here.
I will never forget that case as long as I live. It still makes me sick to my stomach to think about it 20 years later.
In fact Terri Schiavo’s death affected me so much that four years ago when my 98 year old Mom was in her last days in a critical care hospice situation I made them put an IV in her arm because I told them I didn’t want her to die of dehydration like Terri Schiavo. A very empathetic Physician’s Assistant told me that my Mom was a different situation because she was actually dying and her body was shutting down and she wasn’t suffering so I let them take it out.
JEB BUSH! You will burn in hell for not saving Terri when you could have.
Terri Schiavo was MURDERED by her husband and then again by the courts.
The judge in this case (Judge George Greer) will burn in hell as well!
He’s 83, won’t be long now George.
From what I read at the time, in FL law, if a husband had done something like getting involved with another woman, he would not be allowed to be the person responsible for decision-making.
The bishops did nothing; Jeb Bush, a Catholic since 1995, did nothing, the courts did not do what they ought to have done.
Moreover, William Buckley, also Catholic, wrote a horrific article which exposed his complete ignorance of all aspects of the situation, including the Catholic moral theology which would apply.
An absolutely abysmal event.
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.