Posted on 01/29/2006 10:06:22 AM PST by NormsRevenge
WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who took a leading role in the Terry Schiavo case, said Sunday it taught him that Americans do not want the government involved in such end-of-life decisions.
Frist, considered a presidential hopeful for 2008, defended his call for further examinations of the brain-damaged Florida woman during the last days of a bitter family feud over her treatment. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state.
The case became a rallying point for right-to-life advocates, an important segment of the Republican Party. It also drew interest from those supporting the right to refuse life-sustaining medical treatment and led to charges that the GOP was using a family tragedy for political gain.
Asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" if he had any regrets regarding the Schiavo case, Frist said: "Well, I'll tell you what I learned from it, which is obvious. The American people don't want you involved in these decisions."
Schiavo, 41, died March 31, nearly two weeks after her feeding tube was removed and 15 years after her initial collapse and hospitalization. Courts in Florida had supported her husband's contention that she would not want to live in such a state. Her parents and siblings disagreed and for years fought efforts to remove her feeding tube.
An autopsy later showed that Schiavo had suffered severe, irreversible brain damage and was blind.
Frist, R-Tenn., said in the full Senate that he supported what he called "an opportunity to save Mrs. Schiavo's life." A heart surgeon, Frist had viewed video ordered by a court and taken by a board-certified neurologist who had concluded she was not in a persistent vegetative state.
Congress passed a bill to allow a federal court to review the case, and President Bush quickly returned from his Texas ranch to sign the bill into law. But a federal judge refused to order the tube reinserted, a decision upheld by a federal appeals court and the Supreme Court.
Frist was later mocked as having made a diagnosis from his office using a video screen. "I didn't make the diagnosis," Frist said Sunday. "I raised the question of whether or not she was in a persistent vegetative state."
Looking back, Frist said, "When you're taking innocent life, with parents who want that life preserved, you've got to make sure, and therefore stepping in to say, let's take one more review, that's what we did."
He added: "I accept the outcome. I don't agree with the moral sense of it."
Frist plans to leave the Senate when his second term expires in January 2007. He said Sunday he will return to his home in Tennessee and decide whether to seek the Republican nomination for president.
Pro-euthanasiacs try to convince folks that physician assisted death is a "private" matter. Of course it's not private -- others are dragged into the picture.
The Schindlers had millions of people behind them.
Keep your butt and the governments out of my family's business.
Keep your butt and the governments out of my family's business.
>>>
No.
I don't want to be killed by Dr. Kevorkian II.
Let's me get this straight,
are you saying the courts revisited the facts of the case?The lurkers should be told -- the courts didn't do that.
So...
you admit that Michael started the "drag in the government" thingie.
My grandma could eat right up 'til the end. She was actually eating breakfast when she died of a heart attack. Even if she'd had a food tube, I'd never have considered pulling it. (By this time, she'd fallen and broken her hip and then had a stroke so we couldn't understand what she was saying.) If my aunts had tried something like that I would have fought them any way I could have to protect my grandmother from them. Well, only one aunt is the kind who would have possibly tried something like that.
They were doing a procedure down in Mexico to help people with congestive heart failure (I read about it in Time Magazine), I presented it to my grandmother for her to decide. She decided it was too experimental even though it was supposedly by then being tried at the Mayo clinic.
Also, it was more than just an enlarged heart with the congestive heart failure, her heart valves were all messed up and she would have had to have surgeries on those and I don't think she would have made it through all that.
But it was her decision not to go through a surgery like that. She died peacefully and naturally in the nursing home.
I have said goodnight. I'll say it again.
Good night.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/sfl-killerbees-jan28,0,1875683.story?coll=sns-ap-football-headlines&track=mostemailedlink
Think about this carefully, please...you REALLY want the government involved in this? REALLY?
Just using your argument: So lets say today the government gets involved to prevent murder of the inconvenient. Now, government is involved. 20 years from now, due to precedent, the government is involved in those decisions, but now takes the other side. How would you respond?
Law enforcement isn't watching either. What's scary is that homeland security is participating on the side of euthanasia. Most lurkers and freepers don't know this.
Think about this carefully, please...you REALLY want the government involved in this? REALLY?>>>
Yes. REALLY. I for one don't want to be killed by a medical exterminationist.
The day I can't provide for myself 100% is the day I check out and you or anyone else can't stop me, at that point I have no right taking up space on this planet!
I want goverment protecting life from murder ...at the beginning and at the end. And of course while the person is healthy and independent.
Why is that such a hard thing for a conservative to contemplate?
Now, government is involved. 20 years from now, due to precedent, the government is involved in those decisions, but now takes the other side. How would you respond?
>>
Let's let a far smarter man than you answer that:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...."
Wheee The People:"Yawnnnnnn....me too. "
I hope you both have a very good evening.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.