Posted on 03/20/2005 9:26:17 AM PST by Dane
Mother pleads for Terri Schiavo's life
MITCH STACY
Associated Press
PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - Hanging their hopes on a last-minute compromise in Congress, Terri Schiavo's parents notified her hospice to prepare to have her feeding tube reinserted on Sunday, her third day without food or water.
Congressional leaders from both parties hoped an agreement reached on a bill would allow the tube to be restored while federal courts review her case. The House and Senate were expected to take up the legislation by Sunday or early Monday. If passed, President Bush planned to sign it.
SNIP
But Mary Schindler pleaded for parents nationwide to call their congressional representatives and pressure them to vote for a bill to prolong her daughter's life.
"There are some congressmen that are trying to stop this bill," she said outside her daughter's hospice. "Please don't use my daughter's suffering for your own personal agenda."
SNIP
Rep. Robert Wexler, D-Fla., issued a statement late Saturday saying he will make an objection that would stop the vote Sunday. Any member can demand that a majority of members be present to do business. Rep. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., said he was trying to gather enough votes to defeat the bill Monday
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
how far do you take your stream of "logic"?
you respect a spouses decision to put their spouse to death?
do you respect their decision to withhold basic medical treatment and testing too?
boy, let's keep going, you respect their decision to cheat on them? to not divorce someone who has no ability to instigate a divorce on their own?
i'd agree this is outside of the case being discussed but it sounds like you think marriage is way of giving up legal rights to life? it was the woman's decision to marry the guy so it is just "unfortunate" that he has decided to eliminate her?
is this true? Where did you find this?
"I agree what you just said, so now we want to throw it open all the way????
I'm about as conservative as they come, but I refuse to give anyone but the one I chose..my wife, my wife and my wife, the authority to determine my fate should I be that incapacitated.
Here is my fear if we open this door...
Picture Hillary Clinton in office and a dem congress. It is decided something must be done about the blood shortage in this country so the Feds decide to "tap" every comatose patient in the country. Keeping them alive just to feed the blood banks.
Don't think it can't happen. If you give the feds the ultimate decision, they will USE it!"
Actually, I think our views on this issue are quite similar, but the examples of this case make it almost impossible for the fed gov. not to get involved.
Here we have a husband that is so questionable about this motives I think 9 out of 10 would agree that he is not standing for his wife, but for himself instead. We have a liberal judge not ruling on the facts of this case, and the dems holding it against this women that she lives in FL.
IMO (which means nothing in this case) This case is more about the hate/payback of George Bush and Jeb than it is about Terri.
I guess my emotions in this case are louder than my fear of "what's next", which is not good.
It scares me that one judge has the power do push a country into such a divide.
Liberals in Congress already do whatever they feel like. What would be new here?
Besides, the alternative precedent--that one stinkin' probate judge who cheated to get elected has more power than the Florida Assembly, Florida Senate, U.S. House, U.S. Senate, Governor of Florida, and President of the United States, combined, is far worse.
The Terri Schiavo case painfully illustrates the fact that the ‘rule of law’ in our republic has found itself surreptitiously transformed into a spiderweb of irrational ‘legalities’ that no longer have any foundation in ‘justice’.
Our modern legal/judicial system is now based on decades of irrational precedents, set by (1) juries who were incapable of critical thought and who allowed themselves to be thought-programmed by glib attorneys, and (2) judges whose agenda is focused on self-enrichment and socialist societal engineering rather than truth and fairness.
Often, when an issue becomes clouded by a maze of man-made, agenda-driven ‘technicalities’, the simplest analysis can help to clear away the smoke. The following facts are pretty much accepted by most observers of this case:
(1) Terri’s physical and mental states are the result of circumstances that place her husband in a less than favorable light
(2) that same husband has denied her even minimal physical therapy, and has instead seen to it that stimuli have been denied her for fifteen years
(3) countless reputable medical specialists familiar with her case have observed that, even after fifteen years, the patient could benefit from, and respond to, appropriate therapy
(4) the patient’s family is willing to assume all financial and physical responsibility for her care from here on in, and
(5) the husband is insisting on cremation of the body, without benefit of further medical examination after death.
Is there anyone out there with half a brain who doesn’t know where the truth lies, and what justice would entail in this case? So what is standing in the way of justice being done here? When did common sense cease to play a role in our legal/judicial system? And when did unaccountable judges, unscrupulous lawyers, and jurors who are incapable of rational analysis of facts, obtain the upper hand over our lives and liberties?
A week ago, when Brian Nichols was captured, after having killed, in plain view of numerous witnesses, four innocent citizens, most of us spent significant time listening to ‘legal experts’ predict his fate. To a person, these ‘legal experts’ agree that his journey through the legal/judicial system will amount to a circus (not unlike that represented by the O.J. Simpson or Scott Peterson trials), after which he will no doubt remain on death row for a decade or two, while the inevitable appeals take their toll in money and manpower. The entire charade will no doubt wind up indirectly costing taxpayers millions, while tying up the courts (city, state, and/or federal) for hundreds of thousands of hours.
The tragedy in all of this – the Schiavo case, the Nichols case, and countless others that occur on a daily basis in every city and town across this country -- is that we accept this perversion of ‘justice’ as an inevitable part of life in America 2005.
We have become like the Pharisees whom Christ consistently sought to redeem in the New Testament. Much of His ministry was spent doing spiritual battle with their ‘legal traditions’. They demanded that He validate and approve what they called the tradition of the elders. In effect, they wanted Him to consider their foolish man-made laws equivalent to the laws of scripture. Christ was vehement that He would not give His blessing to these man- made traditions saying, ‘You lay aside the commandment of God and hold higher the tradition of men.’ The Pharisees’ laws set up a barrier between scriptural law and their nit-picking human edicts. Because they stopped people from learning and embracing the word of God, and forced them to focus on nonsense, Christ admonished them for making laws for the sake of laws. He consistently rebuked them, saying ‘Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered.’ (Luke 11:52)
There is no more pointed demonstration of the chasm between ordinary human thinking and the mental processes of the lawyer than in the almost universal reaction of law students when they first encounter The Law. They come to law school a normally intelligent, normally curious, normally receptive group. Day in and day out they are subjected to the legal lingo of judges, textbook writers, professors – those learned in The Law. But for months none of it clicks; there seems to be nothing to take hold of. These students cannot find anywhere in their past knowledge or experience a hook on which to hang all this strange talk of 'mens rea' and 'fee simple' and 'due process' and other unearthly things. Long and involved explanations in lectures and lawbooks only make it all more confusing. The students know that law eventually deals with extremely practical matters like buying land and selling stock and putting thieves in jail. But all that they read and hear seems to stem not only from a foreign language but from a strange and foreign way of thinking.
Eventually their confusion founded though it is in stubborn and healthy skepticism is worn down. Eventually they succumb to the barrage of principles and concepts and all the metaphysical refinements that go with them. And once they have learned to talk the jargon, once they have forgotten their recent insistence on matters-of-factness, once they have begun to glory in their own agility at that mental hocus-pocus that had them befuddled a short while ago, then they have become, in the most important sense, lawyers. Now they, too, have joined the select circle of those who can weave a complicated intellectual riddle out of something so mundane as a strike or an automobile accident. Now it will be hard if not impossible ever to bring them back to that disarmingly direct way of thinking about the problems of people and society which they used to share with the average man before they fell in with the lawyers and swallowed The Law.
… Fred Rodell, Professor of Law, Yale University, 1939
~ joanie
This whole thing might be different if we knew she had had every chance to get well, but she hasn't. She was shuttled off to a hospice immediately and allowed to lay there and deteriorate. No sunshine, no therapy, no visitors without his approval. I'm having a real hard time with this. Anyone who fears being kept alive on artificial support has only to make out a living will. In the meantime, I don't think a judge had the right to make this decision.
Question to all:
Is food and water extraordinary means?
I think you did the right thing in your case. Your boy is in heaven right now in wonderful peace and joy.
But, for Terri, I just am not willing to kill her without strong evidence it was her wish. I don't trust Michael farther than I can throw him.
You gotta be kidding me. The loose-canon Judiciary has been running roughshod over the family for decades now and you're concerned about Congress stepping in and curtailing the Judicial abuse of power???
When I think of how the judiciary has utterly trashed the family by legalizing abortion on demand and gagging the father's say on the issue, and how they've viciously attacked the traditional family by allowing for homosexual perverts to legally 'marry' and adopt children, and how they've allowed the police the power to crash into a man's house and arrest him if he so much as puts his index finger on his wife's nose during an argument, and how they've allowed little children to have access to pornography in public libraries and at home, at how they've trashed the 2nd Amendment rights to bear arms by allowing frivelous and ridiculous law suits against gun companies because their product was used in a crime, I am just amazed at your post.
I think they are in deep denial. So was I for a bit. You should have seen me. I have been around families where their kid was on deaths door and the opinion of the doctor was that they were not going to make it. And lo and behold they recovered. Of course miracles happen. If there was one percent chance of a full recovery I would go for it sure. I just dont think it is going to happen in this case. I will conceed this however, If her parents are willing to take full and complete responsibility for Terri, I do not understand why her husband will not allow it. I will admit I am baffled about this.
How do you know that? How do you know what her condition really is? How do you know what the brain can or can not do?
This lays the groundwork for nothing. It is an extraordinary case that sets no precedent.
Ah, so you would only have saved him if he could become "normal". I see.
Unfortunately, Terri may not make it according to what is being reported on the long thread, by one of our freepers who is on site at the hospice.
Terri now has a high fever, something happened when they pulled the feeding tube, and she now has a bad infection.
If I remember correctly, Terri has been denied antibiotics in the past. I can't imagine they would give them now, since they're actively taking her life.
Under that scenario, one could demand a trial by jury. In this case, the judge has become both the finder of fact and law...very dangerous if the judge is either (a) incompetent or (b) corrupt.
Because from the court papers available, I have read that pretty much is the case. I have also been around this type of situation and have seen people in her condition, namely very close family members. But then again what do I know. :-)
Must be The Living Church of the McDonald's.
If by "this state" you mean trapped in a hospice by a "husband" who openly hates her and her loved ones, and threatens to remove access from anyone who tries to do anything too nice for her, well I don't think she'd want to live in that state: I think she'd much rather live at home with parents who would fawn over her, take her out in the sunshine and fresh air, maybe get her a cat (since her "husband" killed hers), etc.
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