Posted on 03/19/2025 9:43:19 AM PDT by Morgana
March 31 will mark the 20th anniversary of the death of my sister, Terri Schiavo. In 1990, Terri, age 26, sustained a brain injury under suspicious circumstances while home alone with her husband, Michael Schiavo. Terri’s brain injury affected her ability to swallow, necessitating the use of a feeding tube.
Terri did not have a medical directive, so Michael was appointed by the court to be her caretaker, authorized to make all treatment decisions in Terri’s best interest. At that time, my family did not foresee any issues with Michael managing Terri’s care or the medical trust, which was valued at nearly a million dollars and established in January 1993 for Terri’s lifelong therapy.
However, shortly thereafter, in the spring of 1993, Michael unexpectedly had a change of heart. Instead of honoring his wedding vows, he decided to end Terri’s life. Michael knew that if he succeeded, he would inherit Terri’s medical trust.
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In 1997—after two failed attempts to take Terri’s life by refusing to treat her urinary tract infections—Michael hired a pro-euthanasia attorney and petitioned the Florida court to remove Terri’s feeding tube. My family immediately objected. We were confident that the court would recognize Michael’s true motivations. After all, he had a live-in girlfriend (whom he admitted proposing to while still married to Terri) and if successful would receive Terri’s million-dollar trust fund.
In January 2000, after a week-long trial, Pinellas County Florida Circuit Judge George W. Greer ruled in favor of Michael. Committed to defending Terri, my family engaged in a lengthy legal battle to preserve her life. On March 18, 2005 – five years after the original trial, Michael accomplished his calculated plan to kill his wife – Terri’s feeding tube was removed.
What followed was an excruciating death lasting more than 13 days. Our family watched helplessly as Terri endured a brutal death by dehydration and starvation.
In response to this perversion of justice, our family founded the Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network to spare other families from experiencing the same tragedy as Terri. We had three goals: advocating for patients, educating the public about existing threats in healthcare, and ensuring that Terri’s senseless and inhumane death is never forgotten.
Now, 20 years into our work as patient advocates, we recognize that, while our country is home to some of the best healthcare available anywhere, the problems with how we treat our most vulnerable are serious and growing worse.
As shocking as the question may be, we must ask how the United States reached the point where, for the first time in its history, a court ordered the death of an innocent, brain-injured American citizen, and where such an act has come to be seen as appropriate for other defenseless patients.
Historically, the medically vulnerable, like Terri, have been discriminated against, exploited, and even subjected to violence. Societies have often victimized people they deem deficient or unproductive—whether due to skin color, mental or physical conditions, illness, or age.
Changes around the administration of food and water via feeding tubes are one threat to the medically weak. In the 1980s, feeding tubes transitioned from being considered basic care to being classified as “medical treatment,” making it legal in all 50 states to remove or deny individuals feeding—even when they are not actively dying and their bodies can still process food and fluids. The reclassification of feeding tubes places countless individuals, who are already vulnerable due to their medical conditions, at risk of death.
Personhood theory is another threat. In a 2002 column titled “The new grim reapers: Practitioners of bioethics say who should live — and who should die,” esteemed author and attorney Wesley J. Smith warned that bioethicists argue that some people in society should be viewed as “human nonpersons.”
In other words, they believe that what matters morally is not being “human” but being a “person”—a status earned by having self-awareness and behaving rationally. According to this thinking, unborn babies, infants up to two years old, individuals with Alzheimer’s disease, and people with severe cognitive disabilities are human but not persons.
Joseph Fletcher, Peter Singer, and other influential figures in modern bioethics are responsible for the alarming trend of labeling people like my sister “nonpersons”—a phenomenon currently affecting how society perceives and treats the cognitively disabled.
The push for personhood theory and reclassification of feeding tubes reflects a growing U.S. healthcare trend that views vulnerable people as burdens and strips them of autonomy. Recent policies and legal changes underscore a dangerous mindset linking human dignity to perceived utility or worth.
After years of warnings about these developments, the Covid-19 pandemic exposed many of the disturbing realities within our healthcare system. Across the country, the shifting of control over treatment decisions from patients and their loved ones to external authorities has revealed an anti-life, anti-Christian worldview. This shift has led to instances of unethical medical practices toward patients and their families as well as a decline in protections for those in medically precarious conditions.
Consider just a few of the life-threatening changes now entrenched in patient care: medical futility policies, denial of due process for families, imposition of DNR orders without consent, terminal sedation to hasten death, using brain death or PVS classifications to justify care termination, ethics committees overriding patient wishes, pro-death medical directives, and doctor-assisted suicide.
In pushing these policies, hospital administrators, lawmakers, government officials, and ethicists are prioritizing financial outcomes over patient care. They are compromising treatment quality, limiting people’s choices, and undermining the doctor-patient relationship. Yet, as they take the power to decide who lives and dies for themselves, little is being done to stop, let alone reverse, the undermining of humane, patient-centered decision-making.
Compounding the issue is the public’s ingrained trust in hospitals and doctors. The media, especially Hollywood’s glorification of the medical field, perpetuates the false belief that physicians will always do everything in their power to save lives, masking the chilling reality that scripted narratives of frantic heroism are seldom accurate depictions of real life.
To this day, the medical community, the media, some bioethicists, the clergy, and others continue to be dishonest about my sister’s condition and how society cares for people like her. Sadly, even some popular Christian conservatives have joined in on labeling those with cognitive challenges “vegetables,” failing to recognize how this offensive term undermines all human life.
For the sake of egregious deception, the court prohibited cameras in Terri’s room during her two-week death. They cited privacy concerns to justify hiding what was happening. They publicly claimed that Terri looked “beautiful” and was having a “peaceful experience” as she dehydrated to death.
The lies continue unabated, constructing a narrative, persuading the public that Terri’s death, along with the abuses occurring every day in hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices across the country, are acceptable.
To cut through the pretense, I decided to try and describe the suffering Terri endured. I wanted others to have a sense of the cruelty and injustice inflicted upon her. I wanted a record of the heart-wrenching ordeal that my family and I will carry with us for the rest of our lives. Here is the truth:
After almost two weeks without food or water, my sister’s lips were terribly cracked, to the point where they were blistering. Her skin became jaundiced, with areas that turned different shades of yellow and blue, and she was noticeably dehydrated from the lack of water. Terri’s breathing became rapid and uncontrollable as if she were outside sprinting. Her moaning, at times, was agonizing, which indicated to us the unbearable pain she was experiencing. Terri’s face became skeletal, with blood pooling in her deeply sunken eyes and her teeth protruding forward. I can never properly describe the nightmare of having to watch my sister have to die this way. What will forever be seared in my memory is the look of utter horror on my sister’s face when my family visited her just after her death.
Not long after Terri passed away, my dad and I had a private conversation. He was heartbroken, and during a quiet moment, he confided that he would never forgive himself for not being able to save his daughter. My father passed away in 2009 from heart failure. The death proponents will continue to maintain their moral innocence. They will continue to use euphemisms as a weapon to deceive the public. Yet, we must not look away from what is happening to our innocent disabled brothers and sisters: their intentional and premeditated killing because others deem them unworthy of life.
We have a duty to unite in protecting people at risk and in speaking out against this wickedness. We must make it unthinkable for anyone—whether family or medical provider—to starve and dehydrate another person to death.
As followers of Jesus Christ, we are guided by His truth and the understanding of His eternal judgment. We are called even more so to cry out against these injustices until only the willfully blind could mistake such wickedness for compassion.
LifeNews Note: Bobby Schindler and his family work as patient advocates, establishing the non-profit Terri Schiavo Life & Hope Network in honor of his sister, Terri. Click here to learn more about the Life & Hope Network.
Terri Schiavo RIP
Scumbag lawyers and judges permitted this murder. Never forget that.
Courts tend to be incredibly stupid and wrong headed.
If you assume courts are going to do the right thing, you are likely in for a shock.
They are the Dumbest "smart people" in our society.
And this is when Jeb bush outed himself as the piece of dogscat that he really was by not staying her starving to death.RIP Terry.
I will always consider the attorney and judge as guilty of conspiracy to commit murder.
... and don’t forget that self-described “constitutional scholar” Hugh Hewitt pubilicly supported the legal killing of this helpless American citizen.
What is especially despicable about the affair is that the dem party had a Schiavo in the White House from 2021-2025, continuing to prolong his worthless life by any means necessary.
I remember it too. There were some people involved that used to post here at the time. I don’t remember their screen names.
I have not forgotten.
But in a big sense Jeb Bush has probably not forgotten because on that day he died to me and many other serious Republican primary voters.
And the rest is history.
And Jeb Bush.
Agreed. Jeb Bush killed his political career by letting her die.
“In 1990, Terri, age 26, sustained a brain injury under suspicious circumstances while home alone with her husband, Michael Schiavo.” Hmmm . . .
This was one of the saddest episodes in US history—alongside slavery
And they even had cops arresting a boy who tried to bring a bottle of water to the clinic (in the hopes of feeding Terri so she wouldn’t die of thirst).
Filthy scumbag cops put handcuffs on the boy.
And Jeb Bush was an accomplice thinking this was his way of appealing to demonicRATS whose votes he would need in order to become President.
And also remember who was President at this time, W
could have stopped this!
I lost faith in W then.
“Accidents” would have occurred after the fact, just saying.
It was a murder. A judicial murder, but still a murder. What happened to the main players?
Yes the Terry Schiavo case was for sure a turning point in the morality of our “legal society”
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