Posted on 07/15/2005 11:56:01 PM PDT by ElPatriota
Terri Schiavo died in 2005.
LOL...
Earthdweller might be right about the front line
medical staff being too assimilated to the culture of
death. Assuming any of N.Z.s claims of experience
are true, I shudder at the thought on him making any
triage decisions whatsoever.
And he said "I've NEVER heard that from her parents in any of the many interviews I have seen with them."
Obviously, I was the one in the wrong here. It's pretty obvious from all the emails I have seen, my understanding was simplistic and basically incorrect. The issue was way more complex than that. In any case, I will use this email TO THANK EVERYONE for their participation and the knowledge I now have. I sill don't understnd the full scope of this issue, but at least I have resouces now if I chose to read and learn more about it.
Thank you Freepers
You just repeated what the advocates of forced euthanasia have been saying all along, yet somehow it makes more sense when you put it together into one post. Now I understand. It makes perfect sense. I can now forget all about Terri, and back off so it can happen to others. Some day, it will be my turn. After I die, and the death squad shows up to kill me (again), I too will sit bolt upright. But I'll be reading from a different script, and I don't think they'll like the final act.
Your answer can be found between:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
and:
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all. Amen.
Which part of the gospel requires us to condone murder?
Scooping the brains out of chickens for entertainment is also sick.
Did you bother reading any of the replies before you typed up your response? If you had, you would know that Terri's family had not only offered to take care of her, they begged.
"I hate to say this, but I am ambivalent about this whole issue."
First, thank you for the thread. It may help a few people better understand the issue.
Maybe I am wrong here, but I understand you have shaped a perspective based not on our public posts, but on freepmail none of us would see. If that is the case, it is bothersome, because those of us who are repository to the actual facts and information post publicly and have no need to try to shape your opinion through freepmail.
You have seen on this thread a few detractors who appear with vigor and very old and worn arguments and who try to shout down the truth. And you have seen as well, many doors open to the truth. If you pursue this further, you will find the detractors use the same disproven and emotionally charged axioms ad nausium.
One door is our own focal point, the Terri Dailies link I posted on #37. Through that thread, you would find access to most any question on the issue. I notified our own group of your thread here so they may offer some insight.
Your own response reflects the ambivalence you mention about what happened. If that continues, then you have not really followed the issue at all, but allowed yourself to be clouded by the detractors.
The thrust of the story is not that religious people were hurt and upset, but rather that this atrocity was a government sponsored murder of an innocent human being rooted in a clash of good and evil.
When you get to the core of the issue, ambiguity evaporates.
8mm
That, of course, was the point of the exercise: the goats [to use the biblical term] cannot keep their stories straight. They have to portray her as dead or subhuman or unworthy of life in order to kill her. They have to hold their noses and claim that Terri herself asked to die, even though she had no capacity to do so. Their whole legal case rested on that one shabby, transparent lie.
I cherish different memories of Terri: not how low and horrid she was, but how sunny and alive she was despite her handicap. I love the stories of Terri sitting at the nurses' station "chatting" with the nurses and being pampered with bowls of pudding and jello. I was delighted to hear that Pat Anderson's husband painstakingly taught her two or three words. I was warmed by the special smile she had for her mother and her raucous laugh at her father's jokes. And best of all, I'm quite sure she got a crush on attorney David Gibbs.
The human spirit is amazing.
You say an EEG show no cortical function, only brainstem. But the autopsy found that a fair amount of her cortex was "relatively preserved." This would account for the functions actually observed by nurses, doctors, family members and friends -- as opposed to what you predict from the one EEG.
Dr. Hammesfahr had this comment about it: "The autopsy results confirmed my opinion and Dr. Maxfield's opinions, that the frontal areas of the brains, the areas that deal with awareness and cognition were relatively intact. To use Dr. Nelson's words, "relatively preserved." In fact, the relay areas from the frontal and front temporal regions of the brain, to the spinal cord and the brain stem, by way of the basal ganglia, were preserved, thus the evident responses which she was able to express to her family and to the clinicians seeing her or viewing her videotape. The Spect scan confirmed these areas were functional and not scar tissue, and that was apparently also confirmed on Dr. Nelson's review of the slides. Dr. Maxfield's estimates of retained brain weight were apparently accurate, although there may have been some loss of brain weight due to the last two weeks of dehydration."
Sorry, I have eye surgery tomorrow, and will not be able to oblige. I have no idea even when I'll be able to return to Free Republic.
You might want to check CodeBlueBlog's discussion of the controversial nature of the CT you mention. Doc CBB raises another mystery, a CT of Terri's brain 2/27/90, 48 hours after Terri's collapse showing -- normal function. No damage. The atrophy didn't show up until later (the next CT, a month later, showed it). Here again, one lesson is not to bank too much on one test.
In the Name of Politics
By John C. Danforth
The New York Times
Wednesday 30 March 2005
St. Louis - By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included advocacy of a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary effort to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to a feeding tube.
Standing alone, each of these initiatives has its advocates, within the Republican Party and beyond. But the distinct elements do not stand alone. Rather they are parts of a larger package, an agenda of positions common to conservative Christians and the dominant wing of the Republican Party.
Christian activists, eager to take credit for recent electoral successes, would not be likely to concede that Republican adoption of their political agenda is merely the natural convergence of conservative religious and political values. Correctly, they would see a causal relationship between the activism of the churches and the responsiveness of Republican politicians. In turn, pragmatic Republicans would agree that motivating Christian conservatives has contributed to their successes.
High-profile Republican efforts to prolong the life of Ms. Schiavo, including departures from Republican principles like approving Congressional involvement in private decisions and empowering a federal court to overrule a state court, can rightfully be interpreted as yielding to the pressure of religious power blocs.
In my state, Missouri, Republicans in the General Assembly have advanced legislation to criminalize even stem cell research in which the cells are artificially produced in petri dishes and will never be transplanted into the human uterus. They argue that such cells are human life that must be protected, by threat of criminal prosecution, from promising research on diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and juvenile diabetes.
It is not evident to many of us that cells in a petri dish are equivalent to identifiable people suffering from terrible diseases. I am and have always been pro-life. But the only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in the womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law.
I do not fault religious people for political action. Since Moses confronted the pharaoh, faithful people have heard God's call to political involvement. Nor has political action been unique to conservative Christians. Religious liberals have been politically active in support of gay rights and against nuclear weapons and the death penalty. In America, everyone has the right to try to influence political issues, regardless of his religious motivations.
The problem is not with people or churches that are politically active. It is with a party that has gone so far in adopting a sectarian agenda that it has become the political extension of a religious movement.
When government becomes the means of carrying out a religious program, it raises obvious questions under the First Amendment. But even in the absence of constitutional issues, a political party should resist identification with a religious movement. While religions are free to advocate for their own sectarian causes, the work of government and those who engage in it is to hold together as one people a very diverse country. At its best, religion can be a uniting influence, but in practice, nothing is more divisive. For politicians to advance the cause of one religious group is often to oppose the cause of another.
Take stem cell research. Criminalizing the work of scientists doing such research would give strong support to one religious doctrine, and it would punish people who believe it is their religious duty to use science to heal the sick.
During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were principles shared by virtually all Republicans.
But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems to be the other way around.
The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.
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John C. Danforth, a former United States senator from Missouri, resigned in January as United States ambassador to the United Nations. He is an Episcopal minister.
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>> The atrophy won't show up for months. This article in the American Journal of Neuroradiology gives 70 days as the minimum time to wait to check brain volume,
But it did show in the 3/30 CT. 35 days, not months. I don't recall that they were checking "brain volume," but you could look that up if it matters. I'm out of time.
Cheers.
In short, I may pursue to know more about it later on.
Bye for now
In short, I may pursue to know more about it later on.
Bye for now
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