Posted on 03/27/2005 1:30:00 PM PST by Gondring
For 13 years Terri Schiavo has been in a coma - with her husband, her parents, the Christian right and now the president's brother locked in a bitter struggle over her fate. This week could see a final decision on whether she lives or dies. Suzanne Goldenberg reports from Florida
The woman's eyes are open in the video. She slowly rolls her head along the pillow, keeping up a constant low moan, as a man's arm dangles a metallic balloon overhead. "Look over here, Terri," a male voice says. "Can you follow that at all?"
The medical community and Florida's courts are convinced that Terri Schiavo can't, and, indeed, that she will never be able to recapture even this degree of cognitive ability. So too is her husband, Michael Schiavo. Over the years, he has tried three times to remove her feeding tube.
But Terri's parents, Mary and Robert Schindler, say she can improve, and have collaborated with the Christian right in America to turn this very private tragedy into a national pro-life pageant. Using the internet, press and Christian radio and television shows, anti-abortion groups have turned Terri's catastrophic loss into a major political gain, expanding the parameters of the pro-life debate.
This week could provide the last act. After a decade of exhausting every legal measure - and all the furore the Christian right can rustle up - the Schindlers have arrived at the final round of their struggle with their son-in-law for control of Terri's destiny.
A judge is deliberating whether to strike down so-called "Terri's Law" - a last-minute reprieve pushed through the Florida legislature by the state governor and presidential brother, Jeb Bush, that forced the hospital to resume feeding Terri two weeks ago.
Terri's Law, condemned by civil libertarians, the legal and medical community, and queasy state legislators, was the Schindlers' last hope. If it fails, the feeding tube will be removed, and Terri will slowly starve to death.
None of this has penetrated through to Terri. In February 1990, aged 26, she suffered a heart attack, brought on by acute potassium shortage caused by bulimia. By the time the ambulance arrived, her brain had been deprived of oxygen for six minutes. She has remained in what doctors call a persistent vegetative state ever since. Her eyes are open, her limbs are contracted, she smiles and grunts occasionally, but without any sense of purpose, according to the majority medical opinion presented to the courts.
But even in that seemingly senseless form, Terri's parents were able to discern a remarkable power within their semi-comatose daughter. Over the years, as successive judges refused their demand to be put in control of Terri's destiny, the Schindlers have enlisted the support of the Christian right to challenge court verdicts that have gone in her husband's favour. In the process, they have turned her into an unwitting heroine for the pro-life movement, and a convenient foil for Governor Bush.
With a year to go before the 2004 elections, Brother Bush has been keeping a weather eye out for causes that would mobilise the pro-life movement. Earlier this year, he outraged legal opinion by intervening to prevent a severely disabled woman, who had been raped in a state institution, from obtaining an abortion. Terri's case has proved as enticing a cause - and the Schindlers are extremely cooperative.
From their rented camper van across the road from the hospice, they have presided over prayer vigils and power rallies, pumping up the emotions in the campaign to keep their daughter alive by smuggling out videos of Terri in her bed, and making them available on the internet. Although her father, Robert, claims that he hates the circus that has developed around his daughter, he seems well practised at delivering his pitch. The fight for her life, the argument goes, is the fight for disabled people across America.
"People are being executed every day. I don't mean by the law. I mean executed by being starved to death - mainly the elderly, and people with Alzheimer's," says Robert. "There is a big, dark secret out there."
His other daughter, Suzanne Carr, who is five years younger than Terri, is more expansive. "This whole notion of doing away with a group of people who don't contribute to society or who can't feed themselves or who are expensive to maintain, that is bizarre, that is crazy," she says. "You might as well put down handicapped people."
It is difficult to know quite what Michael Schiavo makes of all this. As the Schindlers sit in their camper van discussing TV talkshow schedules, he has been all but silent, granting one interview in two years. And so, while one version of Terri's life - the one peddled by the Schindler family - remains well known, there is nothing forthcoming from the person who arguably knew her best: Michael, her husband of six years.
To hear the Schindler family tell it, the trajectory that led to Terri's tragic existence can be traced to her years as an awkward, overweight teenager in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Suzanne produces a sheaf of pictures of a chubby child and teenager, smiling at the camera from behind large spectacles. In the family's authorised version of events, the extra weight made Terri painfully shy.
She emerged from her shell only after slimming down in high school, and was still not entirely sure of herself when she started at a local college in the Philadelphia area. Within a few months, she had met Michael and fallen deeply in love - although perhaps not enough for Suzanne's standards. "He was the first guy to pay attention to her, the first guy to say, 'I love you', and so she married him," she says.
Nowadays, the Schindlers can barely avoid mentioning Michael's name without writhing in hatred. They have reinforced their accusations that he is neglecting Terri by suggesting that he tried to murder her, and that she was a victim of domestic violence.
The Schindlers' lurid accounts of abuse and neglect don't seem to tally with past events. In the early years of their marriage, Michael appeared to be on good terms with the Schindlers. The young couple lived in the Schindlers' condo after settling in Florida in the mid-80s. After Terri's accident, Michael and the Schindlers shared living quarters and the burden of care for Terri.
Those family bonds snapped in 1993 - the same year that a court awarded Terri $1m in a medical malpractice suit, and granted her husband authority over the money to use for her care. Each party now accuses the other of trying to get their hands on the funds. The cash question became even more urgent four years later, when Michael arrived at his momentous decision to end his wife's life. If Terri died, he would inherit the funds remaining in the malpractice suit; so long as she lived, the Schindlers had a hope of challenging his guardianship over Terri, and his control of the money.
By 1997, when Michael was set to remove the feeding tube for the first time, the stage was set for an epic confrontation. It is unclear what led to the change of heart, but Scott Schiavo, Michael's elder brother, says he arrived at the decision soon after the painful death of his own mother. "It sort of woke him up when he was watching my mother die," he says. "One day he just stood up and said: 'I can't do this any more. I can't do this to Terri.'"
Six years later, it has come down to this: videos of a stricken woman on the internet, accusations of murder, and lining up television interviews in a rented trailer.
Today, the Schindlers are spending much of the afternoon with a crew from the Christian Broadcasting Network, operated by the evangelist Pat Robertson. There is no question which side the CBN is on. "There is a spiritual battle going on. There is a pro-death movement out there right now, and it nearly killed Terri," says reporter Wendy Griffith. "From our perspective, it is a spiritual battle. It basically comes down to good and evil, life and death."
Outside the Christian right, such clarity over Terri's fate - or indeed the best recourse for any person condemned to live for years with virtually no brain function - is generally difficult to obtain.
But, given the vehemence with which he has been fighting to prolong Terri's life, it is a little surprising to learn that Robert decided to turn off the life-support system for his mother. She was 79 at the time, and had been ill with pneumonia for a week, when her kidneys gave out. "I can remember like yesterday the doctors said she had a good life. I asked, 'If you put her on a ventilator does she have a chance of surviving, of coming out of this thing?'" Robert says. "I was very angry with God because I didn't want to make those decisions."
Congratulations for swallowing the propaganda, which you demonstrate quite obviously by stating the amputation claim with no context whatsoever. Nevertheless there are several answers to the question.
First of all, he presumes that with proper therapy Terri can be at least partially rehabilitated. That's the primary difference between Terri and his mother. It is one thing if a respirator is intended to be a temporary measure; another if it is permanently necessary.
Secondly, we cannot speak to the wishes his mother may have made. And since Terri did not have a living will and a durable power of attorney, we cannot say in her case either. Who knows, maybe the mother did those things.
Her parents sure knew her a lot longer then her estranged husband.
Your whole argument is that we don't know,which is really what this is all about ... when you don't know you don't kill.
Are these the ones who were found not credible?
Which was the one who appeared after getting caught "borrowing" from her employer?
So, civil disobedience is always morally wrong?
Newbie
765.101 Definitions.--As used in this chapter:
But you're going to have to take it up with the Florida legislature. I don't live in Florida, and I can't do anything about it.
You sound like you would have made a great SS officer...maybe you were in an earlier life...heheheheh....If fetuses carried firearms and embryos carried UZis...the "evil" right to life movement you fear so much would be a pale imitation of what was to come to the homicidal anti-life crowd...YOU scare the Hell out of me....
Unfortunately many people are simply not aware that these laws have existed for that long. If I recall correctly, didn't Nancy Cruzan's case go all the way to the US Supreme Court?
Of course not.
I am merely stating what Jewish halacha (law developed over thousands of years).
Observant Jews follow halacha, non-observant ones do not.
Jewish law also forbids cremation.
Please elaborate.............in detail.
As am ardent pro-lifer, I'm curious as to how my 'eventual aims' are 'evil.'
However, the judge is within the law. The problem is with the law.
I had NO idea that a feeding tube and hydration could be considered "extraordinary measures." I read in the Indiana paper today that there was a case very similar to this one back in the early 90's, which resulted in the removal of the feeding tube. I didn't even remember it, because it got such little press attention at the time.
A lot of the controversy about this case is because people didn't know that a situation like this was possible. Now we do.
The laws need to be changed. By the way, I looked up living wills in Indiana, and while you can REFUSE treatments through one, you can not ORDER that treatments be continued. There is something I had not thought about, either.
Lots of things to think about in this issue, regardless of the character failings of Michael Schiavo OR the Schindlers.
There is also no question which side the "Guardian" is on.
am = an
Plese read post #61 and reread your statement on post #1.
I have no idea whether Terri Schiavo actually did or did not consent to anything - and have virtually no knowledge of her grandmother's instructions or lack thereof - so that subject seems somewhat tangential to my comment on their respective conditions, but thanks anyway.
I'm in total agreement that the laws need to be changed, so that this can never happen again.
No. But Jeb Bush's morality believes he is constrained, as governor, from doing anything here.
I love to watch all the arm-chair promoters around here, jumping offside as they throw somebody else in front of the train.
The only thing worse than a coward is a person who wants somebody else to fight his battles for him.
I didn't realize there were so many Bush haters on this forum until "Terri" took over most of the threads. The only difference being they don't use the vulgar language of DU'ers.
I'm pretty sure that Nancy's case was the first of this type to make it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Her father Joe was a Deacon in the First Christian Church in Carterville Mo. Nancy was a few years older than me (I'm 58). She was involved in an automobile accident where she sustained the injuries that left her brain dead. A few years after Nancy's accident, my sister died as the result of an auto accident with massive head injuries. I still think to this day, that she could have been another 'Nancy Cruzan' if they had controlled the brain swelling. As much as I loved her, I thank God that this didn't happen because I would have been right beside Joe in his fight.
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