This was a weird case. Everyone came out looking bad. Schiavo came out looking bad. The parents came out looking awful (and rightfully so). The pandering politicians who saw chances to exploit a family tragedy to score political points. The talk show hosts who saw this as a way to mislead people into excitment. Everyone. There are thousands of end of life choices made every year by families and spouses. Most are much less clear cut than this one and involve patients with more hope than Schiavo had. I fail to see why this one warranted congress coming back into session and the whole nations attention. I tend to fall with people like Boortz on this one. The woman had been in a coma for more than a decade. She had a zero percent chance of ever waking up (regardless of what some delusional and easily duped posters believe). She was a vegetable, had been a vegetable for a long time, and would always be a vegetable. At some point you have to let go when the soul has long since left the body. I'm a strongly pro-life person but this case was a really stupid one for some pro-lifers to get themselves in a tizzy over.
FWIW this is Boortz's take
"Virtually every single day across this country decisions are made to discontinue extraordinary medical intervention and people are allowed to proceed with the process of dying. In some cases feeding tubes are removed. More often ventilators are turned off. In one case a person starves to death, in another they are suffocated. It happens every day ... but you don't hear politicians screaming about murder. And why? Because those cases don't generate the media heat that this one has.
What makes the Terri Schiavo case different? One thing .. the Schindlers, her parents. I have every bit of sympathy in the world for Terri's parents, but they're living in a dream world. There is nothing left of their daughter .. nothing but a wasted body that transported her on this earth during her life. She is not there. In spite of their hysterical claims, Terri doesn't know who they are when they walk into her room, and she has no emotional response whatsoever when they leave. She is in a persistent vegetative state, not a coma. She will not suddenly sit up one day and ask what's been going on. Her body can sustain only the most basic functions. It will react to pain, but she has no conscious awareness of the pain. The body will react to other stimulus, such as loud noises or lights being turned on and off .. but, again, she has no conscious awareness of any kind as to what is happening around her. Plants react to light. You can hook up a household plant to a machine that can register changes in electrical charges within the plant and determine that the plant has reactions to changes in light and, in some cases, to people coming in and out of the room. Notice that we're describing a plant here .. a plant that has basically the same reactions to stimulus that Terri Schiavo has. The term "persistent vegetative state" wasn't just created out of thin air. Face it. Terri Schiavo has just about the same awareness of the world around her as a philodendron. "
"The congress of the United States worked into the early hours of this morning for one reason; to serve the interests of the so-called pro-life movement. This isn't about Terri Schiavo. It's about abortion. The anti-abortion movement saw an opportunity to take Terri's tragedy and turn it into a spectacular pageant in support of life. "
"We've heard much about torture in recent months ... the alleged torture of Muslim prisoners in Iraq. Can it be said that the Republicans are torturing the soul of Terri Schiavo, and doing it for votes?"
http://boortz.com/nuze/200503/03212005.html
End-of-life choices are one thing. In Terri's case, defibrillation, intubation and the administration of drugs to keep her heart beating and lungs functioning would have been overdoing it; I'm not arguing that. However, food and water are fairly basic needs. No one should be dehydrated to death; no one. Assuming for the sake of arguement that she was permanently brain-damaged and there was no hope of recovery (and honestly, I don't know whether that was the case or not) she should not have had to go through the horror that is such a death. In death by dehydration, the skin becomes so dry that it literally will come off the body if you touch it firmly. The lining of the mouth and nose cracks and bleeds. The urine becomes so concentrated in toxicity that it literally burnse the bladder. The respiratory tract dries out, which means that the normal secretions become very thick, making it difficult to breath. The person dies because of a build-up of toxins, because they can't breathe (due to the thick secretions), because they go into shock or because their blood becomes so thick that it clots in their veins.
No one should go through that.
She was a human being.
Human beings never turn into 'vegetables' no matter their disability or human condition.
If Terri was already gone, why did Michael sue for money to help rehabilitate her?????? Why didn't he just pull the plug and let her go, why sue for money?????
I agree with you 100% with everything you said.
My, my! Showing our ignorance of reality are we?
For your information, Terri came out from her coma approximately five weeks after her *collapse*. She already woke up! Maybe you just believed the earlier misnomers by the MSM that called her comatose. Just because they don't seem to understand the difference isn't any excuse for you. And you called other posters delusional and easily duped! Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!
Terri wasn't in a coma. Mainstream media's got you wrapped.
Whether a person looks good or bad to you should never be a deciding factor in whether or not they're allowed to live. Terri had a right to live, no matter how uncomfortable that makes you.