Terri Schiavo Revisited: Brother Bobby Schindler Speaks

There was not a dry eye in McGivney Hall's Keane auditorium Wednesday as more than 150 students watched a short video of photos and footage from the life of Terri Schiavo-a Florida woman whose tragic medical condition riveted the nation and Congress five years ago.

The video presentation followed a talk given by Bobby Schindler, the late Terri Schiavo's brother and advocate from the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network, sponsored by the CUA student organization Students for Life.

Schindler's talk addressed the misconceptions surrounding Schiavo's death, its treatment by the media, and its ongoing impact in today's culture, in a presentation both emotionally moving, and factually startling.

For many, Schiavo's controversial 2005 death after suffering a traumatic brain injury in 1990 that left her severely disabled, was a vague memory. Current CUA students were between grades 7 and 10 when Schiavo died and for many the details of the case were unclear.

According to Schindler, this confusion exists for most of America because of the misleading coverage the case received in the mainstream media, the many rumors that circulated about its details, and a common atmosphere of both ridicule and acceptance surrounding the event that has developed in pop and media culture.

But Schindler's primary message was a call for awareness in the present day. "The reason why we're still talking about this case, why it's so important, is because this issue did not end with Terri," he said.

Schindler began his presentation by declaring false much of what is now assumed about the case. "She was not in a coma, she was not in a persistent vegetative state, she was certainly not brain-dead. There were no machines, no respirators, dialysis machines, nothing at all hooked up to her keeping her alive, other than food and water."

On February 5th, 1990, Schiavo collapsed in her apartment for reasons still unknown. The lack of oxygen to her brain for several hours left her with what is termed a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Her injury resulted in difficulty swallowing and she was put on a feeding tube.

Schindler explained that in the years following her injury, Schiavo made progress. She was able to go out in a wheelchair and was beginning to say certain words, he said. However, in 1993 her husband and legal guardian Michael Schiavo stopped all rehabilitation and Terri was confined to a nursing home.

"If you do that to anybody with this type of brain injury, they are going to naturally deteriorate, and Terri did," Schindler said. Over the course of the next twelve years, Michael Schiavo and Terri's family became engaged in a legal battle over Terri's life; Michael argued that her wish would be to die, and her family sought the right to care for her at home.

In 2005 after a series of court cases, Congress stepped in, passing a bill giving cases like Terri's the right to a federal review. A federal judge ruled that the original court decision on Terri's case would stand and that her feeding tube would be removed.

"This case is often talked about as an end-of life issue; it's not. She wasn't dying. She didn't have a terminal disease. Doctors said that Terri quite possibly could have lived a normal life span," Schindler argued. Many doctors have argued, however, that Terri's condition was irreversible.

Feeding tubes by law are considered extraordinary means of keeping a person alive. "The health care profession now recognizes food and water as artificial life support," Schindler said. "Food and water have been defined as medical treatment." While debate continues within the medical community, Schindler firmly expressed his belief that food and water should not be denied to patients in Terri's position.

After two weeks without food and water, Schiavo died of dehydration on March 31, 2005 at the age of 41. Schindler called it a "brutal death."

Schindler and his family formed the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation (now the Terri Schiavo Life and Hope Network) as a response to this experience. He described the organization's mission as "advocating for people who are not dying, who are only being sustained by food and water."

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, each year in the United States about 1.7 million people sustain a Traumatic Brain Injury. The CDC reports, "TBI is a contributing factor to a third (30.5%) of all injury-related deaths in the United States." (www.cdc.gov) It is also a signature injury of troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan.

Schindler said these figures are what give the issue such relevance today. "I think this is an issue that's going to touch everyone, either directly or through a family member," he said.

But he also sees his sister's case as part of a larger cultural movement. "We are now deciding whether someone should live or die based on what they can and cannot do," he said. "This is not only a life issue," he said, "but a disability rights issue."

In April, a controversial episode of the TV show Family Guy aired mocking the Terri Schiavo case. Schindler said that such instances in pop culture reveal a "prejudice" against the disabled and "a dangerous apathy in our society."

The distortion of the case in the mainstream-media is nothing recent, according to Schindler. He quoted journalist Nat Hentoff, who wrote in 2003, "The reporting on the fierce battle for the life of 39-year-old Terri Schiavo has been the worst case of this kind of journalistic malpractice I've seen."

Students who attended the event commented on this misrepresentation. Sophomore Meghan Dietzler said, "I didn't even realize that she was not on life support or brain dead. I believed what the media told me, and I thought my family was pretty informed about it."

"I didn't realize how much of an issue this was, or that it affected so many people in our country and in our culture," said sophomore Mary Linn.

Most students were also touched on an emotional level. Freshman Cassian Utrie explained, "This stuff moves you because it's real."

The president of Students for Life, senior Deirdre Lawler said, "I think it was very powerful to hear him talk about it from a personal perspective….These issues can become abstract very easily."

Asked about the club's reasons for bringing Schindler to campus, Lawler said, "We were really excited to have Bobby to represent another facet of our mission which is to promote a culture of life, and his story is very important to address another way in which that culture of life is threatened."

Vice president of SFL, senior Ryan Cooley said, "The intentionality here was to promote and highlight an issue that often goes unspoken of and misrepresented."

President Bush didn't do nearly enough for the pro-life movement, but maybe his book will.

Thread by topher.

Bush: Pro-Life Views Affected after Seeing Remains of Miscarried Sibling

November 8, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Throughout his presidency George W. Bush was unapologetically pro-life, but a strange anecdote found in his about-to-be-released autobiography, Decision Points, has provided new insight into the genesis of his views on the issue.

In a recent interview with NBC's Matt Lauer about the forthcoming book, Bush explained that when he was a teenager his mother, Barbara Bush, suffered a difficult miscarriage.

Barbara obtained the miscarried fetus, and put it in a jar in order to bring it in to the hospital. However, first she showed her teenage son his deceased sibling.

"I never expected to see the remains of the foetus, which she had saved in a jar to bring to the hospital." He added: "There was a human life, a little brother or sister."

"There's no question that affected me, a philosophy that we should respect life."

According to the New York Post, however, Bush told Lauer that "the purpose of the story wasn't to try show the evolution of a pro-life point of view."

"It was really to show how my mom and I developed a relationship."

Ironically, Barbara herself appears not to have been quite as affected by the incident as her son: her views on abortion have been less clear.

In 1992, during her husband's presidential run, she famously argued that abortion should be left out of the Republican Party's platform: "The personal things should be left out of, in my opinion, platforms and conventions."

Meanwhile, Mrs. Bush was coy about where her personal views fell on the issue. "I'm not being outspoken or pro or con abortion," she said. "I'm saying abortion should not be in there, either pro or con."

Big Murder continues the American Holocaust at taxpayer expense.

Threads by Mr. Mojo and me.

Planned Parenthood Got $349.6 Million in Tax Dollars, Performed 324,008 Abortions....

Planned Parenthood received $349.6 million in tax dollars in its fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2008 and paid its president, Cecile Richards, $385,163, plus another $11,876 in benefits and deferred compensation.

Also, according to a “fact sheet [2]” published by the organization, Planned Parenthood Affiliate Health Centers performed 324,008 abortions in 2008.

Planned Parenthood’s fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2008 is the latest year for which the organization has publicly released an annual report [3] and published the annual sum of grants and contracts it received from the government.

The $385,163 in pay Planned Parenthood President Richards received in the organization’s fiscal year ending June 30, 2008 was recorded in the organization’s publicly available Internal Revenue Service Form 990 filed for that year.

Richards also received $346,285 in total compensation from Planned Parenthood and $38,476 in total compensation from related groups in the organization’s fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2009, according to the organization’s Form 990 for that year.

Planned Parenthood did not respond to repeated inquiries from CNSNews.com about Cecile Richards’ compensation.

____________________________________________________

Planned Parenthood Wants to Abort Us into Prosperity

November 8, 2010 (pop.org) - It will come as no surprise to learn that Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards believes that government-funded health care should pay for all birth control, including abortions. After all, since much of this funding would flow to Planned Parenthood, America's number one abortion provider would profit mightily from such a policy.

Of course Richards is smart enough not to say that PP wants to devour our money as well as our children. Instead, she trots out the lame argument that eliminating people will somehow save us all money.

Appearing on the “Bill Press Show,” the Planned Parenthood honcho claimed that “birth control is one of those issues that actually saves the government money.” She went on to say that “we actually feel that covering birth control is not only the right thing to do for women, it's good for women, it's good for their health care, but it's frankly good public policy. An investment in covering birth control actually in the long run is a huge cost savings because women don't have children that they weren't planning on having and all the sort of attendant cost for unplanned pregnancy.”

We at PRI regard Richards's views not only as self-serving, but also as short-sighted. Children do indeed cost money to raise — as every parent knows — but they grow up into productive citizens who produce wealth, pay taxes and, on the whole, leave America a better place than they found it.

If you crunch the numbers, as we have, you will find that the average American baby born today will contribute several million dollars to the economy over his or her productive lifetime. Oppose this to the hundred-odd thousand dollars or so that it will cost to raise the child to adulthood, and you see just how valuable an asset these tiny human beings really are.

Planned Parenthood is an offensive organization because it not only advocates the wholesale destruction of defenseless human beings, but also actually carries out hundreds of thousands of such lethal acts each year in its hundreds of abortuaries. Now it wants us to subsidize, through Obamacare, these immoral acts, telling us that they are saving us money by doing so.

No one denies that it costs money to raise children, of course, but those who do so are making a fundamental investment in the future. Children grow into adults, who not only contribute to the GDP by entering the workforce, but also contribute, using their own special gifts, to creating families, communities, and societies. To view babies solely as economic liabilities, as Richards does, is not only dehumanizing; it makes no economic sense whatsoever.

Now Cecile Richards would probably respond that she doesn't want to eliminate all children, only those that are “unplanned.” But how does one define “unplanned?” If your parents were not planning on conceiving a child in a particular cycle, does that make you unplanned? Does Richards not know that an element of chance enters into any conception, meaning that it takes up to twelve months for a couple of average fertility to conceive a child? Or is she focused on aborting all single mothers, as they do in China? I don't know about Richards, but I was unplanned and, therefore, by her simplistic calculations, should have been eliminated as an unnecessary expenditure.

Planned Parenthood's position is all the more nonsensical because the very government health care that Richards promotes so fervently can only be paid for by taxpayer funds. And every single taxpayer starts life in a mother's womb.

Last spring, Nancy Pelosi tried to add hundreds of million of dollars in birth control funding to the so-called “stimulus package” using these same arguments. We opposed this move in interviews with FOX and other media. At the end of the day, her amendment proved too much even for many Democrats to stomach, and it was rejected.

People are not just liabilities, they are assets. In fact, they are the ultimate assets. And they all start out as babies.

Infanticide as birth control.

Thread by me.

British Woman Has Four Abortions in Three Years, Including Late-Term

A 22-year-old British woman is feature in the Sun newspaper in England about her story of having four abortions in the span of the last three years, including one late-term abortion done at 22 weeks into pregnancy.

The interview takes place at an abortion center where Stacy Cutler watches the image of her viable late-term unborn child on an ultrasound monitor.

“Cutler listens to her 22-week-old unborn child’s heartbeat – and her eyes fill with tears,” the Sun reports. “The grainy scan shows the fully developed foetus moving around inside her. But Stacy’s tears are not of joy at seeing her baby for the first time. She has made the heartbreaking decision to have an abortion at this late stage.”

Repeat abortions have long been a problem in England, where thousands of women have had three or more.

Cutler says she had the abortions because she was not emotionally secure enough to have the baby and, despite the multitude of resources, not financially able to do so.

“It was certainly not an easy decision to abort four of my unborn children,” she told the newspaper. “But I realised that it would be unfair to bring those children in to the world when I barely had the money to look after my son.”

Cutler resorted to using abortion as a form of birth control even though she was on the pill each of the four times in which she became pregnant.

She is of the mindset many women who justify their abortions and abortion advocacy groups have about abortion being better than giving birth to a baby in less-than-stellar conditions.

“Women who choose to have an abortion are criticised and looked down on,” she todl the Sun. “But it is far better than bringing a child into the world that you are unable to look after or afford. Obviously I’m not proud of what I have done and I know people will judge me. Abortion should be the decision of the woman who is having the baby – no one else.”

Josephine Quintavalle of the Prolife Alliance commented on Cutler’s story in her own comments to The Sun.

“Stacy’s story is horrifying and it is the reality of the abortion-on-demand state we are living in,” she explained. “As part of the ProLife Alliance, I am anti-abortion and her choice is just incomprehensible to me.”

The pro-life advocate said Cutler should have consdiered adoption and the abortion practitioner used an excuse for the abortion that essentially allowed it to be used as birth control.

“For a woman to choose to terminate a healthy baby that was nearly 22 weeks simply because she realised she didn’t want it is beyond belief. Babies can and have been known to live from 23 weeks. I cannot understand why she could not go full term and give the child up for adoption,” she added.

“The doctor clearly felt that it was in the interest of her mental health but, if that is the case, this should certainly be looked at more thoroughly,” she said.

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