Terri Schiavo: il "crimine" di essere inutile
Catholic Ping - Come home for Easter and experience God’s merciful love. Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Posted on 03/23/2005 6:12:34 AM PST by NYer
VATICAN CITY, MARCH 22, 2005 (Zenit.org).- The legal complexities of Terri Schiavo's case may obscure the fact that a person is being condemned to die of hunger and thirst, warns the Vatican's semiofficial newspaper.
In today's Italian edition, L'Osservatore Romano points out that since last Friday, the brain-damaged woman in Florida whose feeding tube has been removed "is not being denied medicines, special treatments or palliatives, but that which for basic reasons of humanity would not be taken away from the most vile and miserable being."
Meanwhile, Schiavo's parents begged a federal appeals court to order the woman's feeding tube reinserted.
An attorney for parents Bob and Mary Schindler told the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, Georgia, that the 41-year-old woman might die before they could get a chance to fully argue their case that her rights are being violated.
The appeal today came after a federal district judge in Florida rejected the parents' emergency request.
L'Osservatore Romano in its article said that amid the exchange of accusations, appeals and judicial surprises in the case, there is a risk of losing sight of the crux of the problem.
"There is a woman in a Miami hospital who is about to die of hunger and thirst," insists the Holy See newspaper.
"A person -- not a 'vegetable' -- is slowly dying while the world watches impotently through television and newspapers," it said. "Her real drama, instead of inspiring a wave of generalized mercy and solidarity, is suffocated by the indecent quest to arrogate to oneself the right to decide on the life and death of a human creature."
"To what chilling eugenic mentality belongs the principle, according to which, life -- even if it is diminished and suffering -- depends on a judgment of quality expressed by other people?" asks the article written by Francesco Valiante.
"Who can judge the dignity and sacred character of a man's existence, made in the 'image and likeness of God'?" he continues. "The doctors whose professional deontology in this case more than ever should make them bring out of their memory chest the known principle 'to cure if possible, always to care'? Terri's parents, who gave her life 41 years ago?
"Or her husband who one day promised 'to love and to honor her, in health and in sickness' and who today has become her coldest and most merciless executioner?"
"Terri's slow and heartbreaking agony is today the agony of the sense of God, Lord of life," Valiante writes. "It is the agony of love that know how to bend down to the frail and needy. It is the agony of humanity."
Early Monday, U.S. President George Bush signed into law a "private relief" bill passed by Congress over the weekend for the parents of Terri Schiavo. The law gave Schiavo's parents the right to make claims in a federal court for the protection of her constitutional rights.
"We commend the president and members of the House and Senate for making it possible for Terri Schiavo's parents to present their case in federal court," said Richard Doerflinger, deputy director of the U.S. bishops' Secretariat for Pro-Life Activities.
"Terri Schiavo is not terminally ill; she is a woman with cognitive disabilities," Doerflinger said. "This law ensures that the decision to discontinue her assisted feeding will be reviewed with full attention to her legal rights."
Terri Schiavo: il "crimine" di essere inutile
Catholic Ping - Come home for Easter and experience God’s merciful love. Please freepmail me if you want on/off this list
Starving a disabled woman to death.
Terri Ping!
Wow - great article. Thank you.
I am writing to the powerful people that I know read this post. Radio and tv people. Please, when the courts have finished and Terri is gone, please air all the facts in a moot court case to show the lies told and evil done to this poor woman. Bring in experts to refute the claims being repeated over and over and arm the insurance companies with facts to keep anyone from getting a dime from Terri's death.
Democrats find it all to easy to legally deny the right to life to those who are the most vulnerable. No retiree in their right mind should ever move to Florida or anywhere else where liberal judges preside and are unimpeachable.
They have come for Terri - so who's next on the right to die train?
I continually just cant get past the fact that this is a woman living without any artificial means... no respirator, no heart machine, no defibrillations... she lives, breathes, digests and metabolizes just the same as the hundreds of thousands of other disabled Americans stricken with CP, autism, extreme Downs, etc.
The claims that she will feel no pain - true or not make me completely enraged. So, therefore, the thousands of patients with spinal injuries or disabilities in feeling pain - should we be any less careful when caring for them? Should we callously withhold basic human needs? Allow bedsores, blisters, infections go without care? Should we use boiling water to clean them? Its pain-free after all. For god's sake - there are laws against the 'abuse of a corpse' and the mistreatment of animals in any way imagineable.
I've had about as much I can take of these experts and their soul-less "science."
Wishing you peace, Terri.
Great article. Thanks You. Is there a fund set up for those who wish to contribute money to help pay for Terri's care if her feeding tube gets reinserted. This must be expensive.
In the State of Florida, there are laws to protect animals from being starved to death!
The most hardened criminal on death row is given a lethal injection; there would be an uproar if the criminal were starved to death. And yet, it is perfectly okay to starve Terri to death, out of convenience.
A woman was arrested yesterday, for trying to bring water to Terri.
Pinellas Park police and Pinellas County Sheriff's deputies arrest Lana Jacobs, of Columbia, Mo., for attempting to bring Terri Schiavo water Tuesday afternoon March 22, 2005 at the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla. A federal judge earlier in the day refused to reinstall Terri's feeding tube. (AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
I've been thinking along those lines too. But couldn't it be a case for "wrongful death"?
L'Osservatore Romano in its article said that amid the exchange of accusations, appeals and judicial surprises in the case, there is a risk of losing sight of the crux of the problem."There is a woman in a Miami hospital who is about to die of hunger and thirst," insists the Holy See newspaper.
"A person -- not a 'vegetable' -- is slowly dying while the world watches impotently through television and newspapers," it said. "Her real drama, instead of inspiring a wave of generalized mercy and solidarity, is suffocated by the indecent quest to arrogate to oneself the right to decide on the life and death of a human creature."
"To what chilling eugenic mentality belongs the principle, according to which, life -- even if it is diminished and suffering -- depends on a judgment of quality expressed by other people?" asks the article written by Francesco Valiante.
"Who can judge the dignity and sacred character of a man's existence, made in the 'image and likeness of God'?" he continues. "The doctors whose professional deontology in this case more than ever should make them bring out of their memory chest the known principle 'to cure if possible, always to care'? Terri's parents, who gave her life 41 years ago?
"Or her husband who one day promised 'to love and to honor her, in health and in sickness' and who today has become her coldest and most merciless executioner?"
Beautifully and powerfully stated.
The absurdities are innumerable.
Excellent. We should overwhelm the courts with these cases as a form of civil disobedience.
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