Posted on 02/01/2006 7:29:10 AM PST by Ohioan from Florida
In the court (and courts) of life and death, a little 11-year-old Massachusetts girl named Haleigh Poutre could be the next Terri Schiavo. For those who have not heard the tragic story, Haleigh was beaten nearly to death last September, allegedly by her adoptive mother and stepfather. The beating left her unconscious and barely clinging to life.
Within a week or so of the beating, her doctors had written her off. They apparently told Haleigh's court-appointed guardian, Harry Spence, that she was "virtually brain dead." Even though he had never visited her, Spence quickly went to court seeking permission to remove her respirator and feeding tube. The court agreed, a decision affirmed recently by the supreme court of Massachusetts.
And so, no doubt with the best of intentions, a little girl who had already suffered so much was stripped by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts of even the chance to fight to stay alive. If she didn't stop breathing when the respirator was removed, which doctors expected, she would slowly dehydrate to death.
Close Call
Then came the unexpected:
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
Absolutely. Terri's parents would have considered caring for her as a gift, not a burden.
The greatest experience of positive freedom, of rising above ones self, comes from being able to love and help another person, especially one who is difficult to love.
I sometimes think that the experience could be compared to a little taste of heaven.
Felos, Schiavo and Greer think they have proven they are powerful.
In reality, they are trapped in their selves more than Terri was trapped in her body.
There's a movie called Holocaust starring Meryl Streep that's very good. It's a very long movie and is the story of the Weis family and what happened to them and during the Holocaust. I don't want to tell everything about the movie but it does show what happened to the disabled in the film.
I checked on Amazon and the movie is expensive about $50 right now. If you're interested maybe your local library can get it for you.
But that is what Hitler did. Oh, yes, he was a National Socialist which is bad (or whatever) and now all socialism is good. Other socialism is good, just that one is bad (for now). Nazi is something you have license to call others if you are a regular socialist.
Notice, as well, no worry about contradictory statements, even when the ideas are interlocked. That is the joy of the left. It is real easy when words are just tools for effect, not for meaning.
Caring for the disabled is a precious privilege few without experience can understand. The rewards are huge, in a special joy.
It looks to me like a bruise. Social Services behaves like the jealous "owners."
I have to restrain emotions and urges when I see that bruise.
Absolutely BEAUTIFUL post!!!!
Certainly looks like a bruise. Staff photo, so apparently it's current.
May God erase Haleigh's nightmare memories so that the darkness never returns. May He make the rest of her whole, and turn the trace of a smile that we see on her face grow into gales of joy.
That's what I thought. Social Services should just shut up. If it wasn't for their ineptitude, Haleigh might not have gotten that last beating.
People have had their children taken from them for much less than a bruise like that. Unbelievable!
All socialism is tribal, regardless of what name a given cult attaches to its tribe.
You don't know what you're talking about. Have you ever watched someone die?
ONE MORE TIME...WE'RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THE DISABLED....WE'RE TALKING ABOUT THE CLINICALLY DEAD. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY is saying disabled people should be killed. NOBODY. We are talking about what the patient would want.
An excellent recounting of the thinking at Harvard so-called University in the late 1960s when they got into the body snatching business. Namely, they wanted body parts for transplants. (They should endow a chair in the name of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mother of Frankenstein.)
Trouble is, when people die, they spoil. You can't use rotten body parts for transplanting.
So at Harvard, they formed a committee and thought and thought and thought until someone exclaimed, "Say, here's an idea!!" If patients are unconscious, tell everyone they are dead ("brain dead"). Then you can carve them up before they get stinky. Then you can sell all the parts. Be sure to say that they were being kept alive artificially and there was no hope for recovery (which is certainly true as soon as we carve them up).
Much of the medical profession has adopted the Harvard Conditions for brain death (notice that being dead isn't one of the conditions), after which the body-snatching surgical team rushes to its task and snips out the saleable parts.
So, she was just...disabled?
Should we starve and dehydrate children born with brain damage due to hypoxia?
• Oxygen Shortage. ...if asphyxia severely lowers the supply of oxygen to the infant's brain for lengthy periods, the child may develop brain damage called hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy. A significant proportion of babies with this type of brain damage die, and others may develop cerebral palsy, which is then often accompanied by mental impairment and seizures.
Insightful! Very good point!
I'll check that out. Thanks for the tip!
Keith Olbermann drooled over Schiavo during his interview.
Tonight, our third story on the COUNTDOWN, Michael Schiavo‘s first television interview since his wife died. If you were with us last night, in a preview you heard him announce he‘s launched a political action committee, Terri‘s PAC, named in her memory to try to keep another family from having to answer those kinds of questions. Our exclusive interview in a moment.
OLBERMANN: On the day Terri Schiavo died, Mr. DeLay said the time will come when the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior. He may have been far more correct about that than he could have imagined.
In his first TV interview in more than a year, Michael Schiavo told me that he had invited all the politicians to come to the hospice to hear his story, to meet his wife, to judge her condition for themselves. But Governor Bush was once just 20 minutes away but none accepted the invitation. Now comes Terri‘s PAC dedicated in part to defeating the politicians who decided the Schiavo‘s lives were their business.
OLBERMANN: Michael, the people who opposed your position on this clearly politicized Terri‘s life and death, do they not now have an opportunity to come back and say, aha, now Michael Schiavo is also politicizing her life and her death?
MICHAEL SCHIAVO, CHAIRMAN, TERRIPAC.ORG: I don‘t think I‘m really out there to politicize. I‘m not out there to do that but to hold these people accountable. These people should not have done what they had done. Any American. You look at the polls. Eighty seven percent of the people disagreed with what these politicians did. They walked into somebody‘s personal lives and took over. And then, then you have Tom DeLay making the same decision for his father. I‘m not understanding that point. Two weeks prior to Terri dying or the feeding tube even being removed, they never even knew who Terri Schiavo was.
OLBERMANN: What about the president? President George Bush?
SCHIAVO: I think I was most stunned with him. I have never in my entire life have ever seen a president slide back from his vacation to sign a bill. He gets up at 1:10 in the morning to sign a bill. OK. That‘s just unbelievable.
I mean, the amount, the millions and millions of dollars it took to do this. It just blew my mind. And it was basically because his brother called him up and said hey, can do you this? I‘m sure that happened. But that just blew my mind.
OLBERMANN: Some of the other figures who were key to this, Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator. A thought about him?
SCHIAVO: The man is clueless. He came down here on one of his campaign trips, stopped by the hospice and pulled up in his limousine and got out and walked the path like Jesse Jackson and the rest of them. Standing in front of this crowd of people talking stuff he had no clue about.
OLBERMANN: Do you think that some of the politicians were sincere but mistaken as opposed to merely trying to make an opportunity for themselves out of this or make an opportunity for a certain aspect of the political spectrum? Was anybody in this who was just sincerely mistaken?
SCHIAVO: I don‘t think anybody was sincerely mistaken. I think Bill Frist, if you look at him now, he is trying to backtrack and use the Terri Schiavo case to win more votes because he knows he was wrong. He should have never opened his mouth. He diagnosed-He‘s a doctor. He diagnosed a patient from watching an hour‘s worth of tape. But then he says he didn‘t do that. That‘s not true. Look at Tom DeLay. He used Terri to hide behind his own problems. He used Terri as a front.
OLBERMANN: To mention Senator Frist, he was on “Meet the Press” last Sunday. Let me read the quote. “I‘ll tell you what I learned from it, which is obvious,” meaning the entire experience of interjecting himself and the American political system into your wife‘s life. “I‘ll tell you what I learned from it, which is obvious, is that the American people don‘t want you involved in these decisions,” using that term you, he‘s referring to himself and the other politicians. When you heard that statement was that vindicating to you? Was it startling to you? Do you think that‘s the best you‘ll get from these politicians?
SCHIAVO: I think it‘s the best we‘ll get from them. They know they were wrong and wrong from the beginning. They should have stepped aside and should not have gotten involved in the first place.
OLBERMANN: Let me wrap it up with a couple personal things. You are married again.
SCHIAVO: Yes, I am.
OLBERMANN: Congratulations.
SCHIAVO: Thank you very much, Keith.
OLBERMANN: How did you preserve that event without it being a tabloid affair? Without it being helicopters overhead with cameras?
SCHIAVO: It was hard but we did it. I guess when we went down to apply for our marriage license the day before, that‘s when it started hitting the news wire. But we were pretty good at that. We kept it quiet. In our invitations, they all know, friends, family, loved ones, supporters, they all knew. They were there to support us. They came and we had a wonderful wedding. It was beautiful. My children were in it.
OLBERMANN: And you even got a honeymoon?
SCHIAVO: Yeah, about 10 of us, we all went to Vegas.
OLBERMANN: Did you have to use an assumed name or is life not that
SCHIAVO: Everything we did for the wedding was under a different name.
OLBERMANN: And I guess that‘s a legacy that unfortunately, that is going to be with one way or another the rest of your life.
SCHIAVO: Yes, it will be. You know something? Terri was a beautiful woman. And she‘ll always be with me. [Michael sheds his fake crocodile tears at this point]
OLBERMANN: Michael Schiavo, our great thanks for your time today, sir.
SCHIAVO: Thank you.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
OLBERMANN: Michael added that until last year he was a Republican. Apart from Terri‘s PAC, Michael Schiavo has another project coming to fruition, his book, “Terri, the Truth,” will be released March 27.
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