http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1502606/posts
From Cheryl Ford today..
Brother of Schiavo still upset over death
He says the courts and her husband mishandled case.
By Jennifer Toomer-Cook
http://deseretnews.com/dn/staff/card/1,1228,151,00.html
Deseret Morning News
Bobby Schindler says his memory is seared with images of his sister,
Terri Schiavo, after courts approved removal of her feeding tube in a
high-profile right-to-die/right-to-life battle he says wasn't always fairly
portrayed in the media.
Bobby Schindler
"Fresh in my mind now is how they tortured her to death, how terrified
she looked prior to her death. . . . That will be an image that stays with
me and my family the rest of our lives," Schindler said in an interview. "She
was beautiful, she was alive, she was a human being and had a family willing
to . . . show her compassion as every human being deserves. But the courts
decided she would be better off dead."
About six months have passed since Schiavo died. And Schindler is on an
international speaking tour of sorts, criticizing the right-to-die movement and,
through the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, pushing for changes in
federal and state laws to protect the lives of the elderly and people with
disabilities.
He addressed about 150 people at Westminster College Wednesday night and
spoke with the Deseret Morning News beforehand. Student leaders had invited him
after learning he had spoken to another university, free of charge. His Salt
Lake speech also included no honorarium, he said. "I think society . . .
has been confused over what compassion is. We're here to love and take care of
these people and not kill them," Schindler said in an interview.
"Everything's been flip-flopped here. What's right is wrong, what's wrong is right. And
anything I can do to shed light on what's happening, God willing, I'm going
to try and do. "She would be doing the same thing for me today."
Terri Schiavo collapsed in the wee morning hours on Feb. 26, 1990. Oxygen
deprivation before paramedics resuscitated the 26-year-old resulted in severe
brain damage. A couple years later, Michael Schiavo prevailed in a medical
malpractice lawsuit, resulting in a more than $1 million judgment. But a feud
ensued between him and Terri Schiavo's family in 1993, Schindler said, after
the family questioned when the money would be spent on Terri Schiavo's
promised rehabilitation and therapy. It deepened when Michael Schiavo had children
with a live-in girlfriend in the mid-1990s, Schindler said.
In 1998, Michael Schiavo petitioned a Florida state court to remove life
support, which in this case was a feeding tube. The judge sided with doctors'
testimony that Terri Schiavo was in a "persistent vegetative state" incapable
of thought or emotion and Michael Schiavo's testimony that his wife had said
on several occasions she would not have wanted life-prolonging measures.
The Schindler family disagreed, saying Terri Schiavo was a practicing
Catholic who loved animals and revered life. They disagreed with the doctors'
prognosis and attempted to take guardianship rights away from Michael Schiavo.
The dispute ignited a national debate over the right to die — and live. It
involved public actions on both sides of the issue, acts of the Florida
Legislature and governor and Congress in allowing federal courts to ensure Terri
Schiavo's due process rights had been protected, and, upon her death, a
statement from the Vatican and discussion over living wills. "Mr. Schiavo's
overriding concern here was to provide for Terri a peaceful death with dignity,"
Michael Schiavo's lawyer, George Felos, said in a news conference after the
woman's death. "This death was not for the siblings, and not for the spouse and
not for the parents. This was for Terri." But Schindler believes the
public was not fully informed about his sister's case due to what one critic
called "journalistic malpractice."
The media "constantly referred to my sister as vegetative . . . as brain
dead" when he says an autopsy did not confirm such, and that a doctor had said
Terri Schiavo could have been in a minimally conscious state. "The press I
think went out of the way . . . to justify the killing of my sister by her
autopsy report." The autopsy report also said Terri Schiavo showed no signs of
suffering from bulimia, or of a heart attack, Schindler said. It concluded
the reason for her collapse was unknown. "Yet that was rarely, if ever,
reported," he said. Schindler believes that media reports shape public discussion.
Public discussion has shifted from one about sanctity of life to quality of
life, Schindler said. He questions the need for the diagnosis "persistent
vegetative state," which he says is a subjectively assigned "death sentence"
that has no purpose "except devaluing a person's life . . . and making it
easier to kill." He likens such prognoses and actions thereafter to years leading
up to the Holocaust. He's worried about the rush to create living wills
without careful thought to temporary life support, that prognoses might be
wrong. Schindler said he did not think Terri Schiavo would have fully
recovered. But the family at least wanted to try rehabilitation. "We loved her.
She was beautiful. She was sacred to us and sacred in the eyes of God. All we
wanted to do is bring her home and care for her."