Terri's Story

Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation ^ | December 3,2006 | Schindler Foundation

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Theresa Marie Schindler was born to Robert and Mary Schindler on December 3, 1963. She was the first of three children the Schindlers would have.

Terri was a shy, but comical, child who had an affinity for music, animals and the arts. She kept a small circle of friends and was dear to schoolmates, neighboring families and her own extended family.

Following high school, Terri came into her own. She developed a knack for sketching and doodling. She enjoyed outings with her friends. She was an adoptive mother to the family’s dog, Bucky.

Terri attended Catholic School while growing up and remained close to her faith throughout her life.

In 1983, Terri met Michael Schiavo at Bucks County Community College and the two began dating. He was the first romantic interest Terri had.

The couple was engaged within a few months and married a year later at Terri’s church in Southampton, Pa. She was 21.

In 1986, Terri and Michael relocated to Pinellas County, Florida and her parents followed three months later.

In 1990, at the age of 26, Terri suffered a mysterious cardio-respiratory arrest for which no cause has ever been determined. She was diagnosed with hypoxic encephalopathy – neurological injury caused by lack of oxygen to the brain. Terri was placed on a ventilator, but was soon able to breathe on her own and maintain vital function. She remained in a severely compromised neurological state and was provided a PEG tube to ensure the safe delivery of nourishment and hydration.

On March 31, 2005, Terri Schindler Schiavo died of marked dehydration following more than 13 days without nutrition or hydration under the order of Circuit Court Judge, George W. Greer of the Pinellas-Pasco’s Sixth Judicial Court. Terri was 41.

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>> It also ignored the testimony of the doctors who advocated killing her.

Hmm. The doctors may not have known Florida's legal definition of PVS. But George Felos knew the law intimately, and he had personal, eyewitness knowledge that Terri Schiavo did not fit the definition. He knew that Terri was aware and could feel pain. Despite that knowledge, he engineered her death.

Felos is an officer of the court. As such he is charged with promoting justice and the honest operation of the judicial system. Law dot com states his responsibilities:

"As officers of the court lawyers have an absolute ethical duty to tell judges the truth, including avoiding dishonesty or evasion about reasons the attorney or his/her client is not appearing, the location of documents and other matters related to conduct of the courts."

Wendy Murphy, a former prosecutor, labeled Michael Schiavo a "fraud on the court." I wonder what she'd have to say about a lawyer/officer of the court who manipulates information presented to the court in order to cause a wrongful death?

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The anniversary of Roe vs. Wade is upon us soon along with the activities decrying it and those defending this horror. Here is a proposed commitment by those of us who recognize the horror for what it is.

............................

40 Years in the Wilderness

DENVER, Jan. 18 /Christian Newswire/ -- Attendees of the annual
Colorado Right to Life, March for Life - Saturday, January 20, 2007 -
West Steps of the State Capitol beginning at 1:30 p.m. will receive a
new pledge to sign, which should begin the end of the pro-life
movement's 40 years of wandering in the wilderness.

According to CRTL President, Brian Rohrbough, "In the months leading
up to the 40th anniversary of America's first abortion law, signed in
Colorado on April 25, 1967, CRTL will be gathering signed commitments
from people around the nation who are sick of regulating the murder of
innocent babies."

"We are tired of compromising on God's eternal law, Thou shall not
murder!" proclaimed Rohrbough.

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40 Years, 50 Million Dead
One Commitment

On the Rule of Law regarding the intentional killing of innocent
people, including by abortion, suicide, and euthanasia, I commit
myself to upholding without exception God's enduring command, "Thou
Shall Not Murder."

My commitment to God's prohibition of murder means that:

I will never approve of any judicial ruling which in any way violates
Do Not Murder.

I will withhold backing from any judge who issues or defends rulings
that violate Do Not Murder.

I will oppose any law which violates Do Not Murder by allowing the
intentional killing of any innocent.

I will never support any law that regulates the killing of the
innocent.

I will never support any law that effectively ends, "and then you can
kill the innocent."

I will agree that, "Do not kill the innocent" (Exodus 23:7) applies
even to the baby fathered by a criminal.

I will recognize that it is morally acceptable to let an irreversibly
dying person die.

I will teach others that it is wrong to starve people to death,
including the elderly, infirm, disabled, and infants.

I will never support any attempt to "do evil that good may come of it"
(Romans 3:8).

I will oppose any man-made process where it requires compromise on
"You shall not murder" (Rom. 13:9).

I will oppose any philosophy that elevates man's law above God's
enduring command, "Thou Shall Not Murder."

I will never allow political goals to move me to compromise on Do Not
Murder.

I will never in any way legitimize the intentional killing of innocent
people, from fertilization to natural death.

I will recognize that any pro-life effort that compromises on Do Not
Murder is a false hope and a dead end.

I will teach others that whenever these two authorities conflict, "we
must obey God rather than men" (Acts 5:29).

Signature: _________ Date: _______ Print Name _________

City: ____________State: _______ Phone:_______________

Background: Forty years and fifty-million victims since Colorado
became the first state to legalize the killing of the innocent, this
40/50/1 Commitment comes from Colorado Right to Life, in an effort to
correct our own failure. Our state has failed America. And our pro-life
community has failed God, because for political reasons we have so
often compromised on Thou Shall Not Murder that today we have
difficulty discerning right from wrong. Many in America's pro-life
community have become legal positivists, defending our officials,
laws, and rulings that intentionally kill the innocent, as long as
they comply with our legal process. Sixty years ago at Nuremberg,
America prosecuted German judges who had personally opposed the
holocaust, but nevertheless upheld and complied with laws to
intentionally kill the innocent; today, our Christian pro-life
community holds up such officials as the hope and heroes of the
pro-life movement, demonstrating our own slide into moral relativism.
We have lost the moral high ground, and now watch the suicide,
euthanasia and even child euthanasia movements gain ground. We must
never again become accessories in the regulation of killing the
innocent in the false hope that we thereby move toward victory. When
those who fear God will compromise on murder for political gain, the
world becomes increasingly dangerous for children and the vulnerable.

Please register your commitment online, by mail, or by phone at the
contact information below and see our website for more information and
for a list of signatories including pro-life organizations and leaders,
and the number of private individuals, listed by city and state, who
have signed this pledge.

Colorado Right to Life website

Contact: Leslie Hanks, ColoradoRightToLife.org, 303-753-9394,
720-394-8946
 
 
·  ColoradoRightToLife.org

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On the other side of the street is Ellen Goodman and cronies with their remarks on the virtues of compromise. Ellen Goodman is her own oxymoron...

Extremists call us extremists.

For at least a dozen years, anti-abortion activists tried to portray their pro-choice opponents as the extremists. In one Republican Congress after another, bills such as those banning so-called "partial-birth abortion" were aimed more at moving public opinion than reducing the need for abortion. Pro-lifers had their eyes on the single prize of finding Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe.

But gradually, from Terri Schiavo to Plan B to stem cell opposition, the right wing overreached. In that reddest of states, South Dakota, voters in November repealed an abortion ban that echoed the theme: No exception! No compromise!

The 'Count of Oxytocin'

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From Time

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

Snip...

Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?

The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.

The Mystery of Consciousness

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>> 765.309 Mercy killing or euthanasia not authorized [Florida code]

>> Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to condone, authorize, or approve mercy killing or euthanasia, or to permit any affirmative or deliberate act or omission to end life other than to permit the natural process of dying.

Terri Schiavo was not dying.

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From ReasonOnline, another oxymoron and from William Colby, not just another cheese...

If you believe every person should have control of his or her mind and body, it probably seems easy to leap to a quick, smug opinion about “our right to die in America.” Of course individuals have a right to die, the standard individualist position goes; the decision to end a terminal illness with the assistance of a physician should be left to the doctor and the patient.

Colby is a lawyer who has worked with right to die issues primarily as they relate to the persistent vegetative state, the condition wherein a person’s body is kept alive long after consciousness is gone. He has been on both sides of the issue, working with families that did and that did not want feeding tubes removed from their loved ones, always supporting their choices over the choices favored by the state. But as we witnessed last year in the case of Terri Schiavo, trying to decipher choice when the person at issue is brain-dead can lead to a complicated mess. If the individual whose life is at stake cannot make life-and-death decisions, who is best qualified to do so?

Our Right to Death

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Florida code 765.101:

(12) "Persistent vegetative state" means a permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is:

(a) The absence of voluntary action or cognitive behavior of any kind.

(b) An inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment.

Was Dr. Ronald Cranford part of the environment? Terri voluntarily and cognitively interacted with him and he complimented her for it. She was, of course, far more responsive to people she knew and liked.

[wagglebee]

She was, of course, far more responsive to people she knew and liked.

I guess some people just can't understand that she was going to be less than cheerful around her adulterous "husband" and his band of ghouls who were complaining that she wasn't dying.

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Some guy in Australia see the President's attempt to save the life of Terri as a factor in what is happening to our to "democracy". Hey, Mom! Are we maximalists??

Domestically, the president's role in the Terri Schiavo case, the execution of his presidential prerogative in the appointment of John Bolton to the UN, and his continued efforts to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court have been no less controversial. It is clear that Bush's presidency must be filed, for better or worse, under “maximalist”.

Snip...

If the political history of the United States has shown the role of the people diminished at times, or the role of the president inflated, that same history also reveals quick inversions and landslide changes that topple existing balances of power.

So too today. The system still stands. President Bush's legacy is far from inconsequential, but far from detrimental. His tenure as a “war president” may even help invigorate democracy, for opposite the threat of silence stands the challenge of speaking more convincingly, more clearly.

Can democracy survive George W. Bush?

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In addition to living with pain we see cases where the poor victims are not in pain at all, quite happy even in conditions amazing to the uninitiated. That is Terri. Here is a wagglebee thread on the topic of dealing with those in pain.

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Christians are called on to help and support those who are suffering through illness or old age, “so that they remain courageous until thenatural end of their lives,” the document reads.


“For Christians, this is the real meaning of “aid in dying”: it is aid in
living until the day when God invites his child to come home.”


For those who are suffering, permitting others to care for them is also an act of service, since, “[t]o allow oneself to be loved and accompanied
by another is to provide the other with the occasion and the privilege
of serving and loving Christ.”


The document emphasizes the central importance of palliative care services, which, it pointedly
states, “never seek to hasten death.”

CCCB Leaflet on Value of Suffering, Palliative Care Counters Push for Euthanasia

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We'd better review this one, too.

In re Christine Busalacchi

From a contemporary New York Times article (Another Right-to-Die Case Poses New Questions):

"Mr. Busalacchi, assisted by Dr. Ronald Cranford, a prominent neurologist and an advocate of patient's rights, had made plans for his daughter to be flown to St. Mary's Rehabilitation Center in Minneapolis, where she would be evaluated by a neurologist specializing in the vegetative state.

"Miss Busalacchi would then have been transferred to a private home hospice unit, where the case would be evaluated by an ethics committee. If the committee agreed that the feeding tube should be removed, Miss Busalacchi would be allowed to die at the hospice unit, Dr. Cranford said."

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Coming up on Monday, the women who regret their abortions. Thread by wagglebee...

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- Hundreds of women who have had abortions and regret their decisions will rally at the Supreme Court building on Monday. Abortion is one of the most common surgical procedures but rarely do women who have them talk about it. One pro-abortion organization hopes to change that.

The Silent No More Awareness Campaign is organizing the rally which has quickly become a highly anticipated annual event in the short time since its inception.

Women Who Regret Their Abortions Rally at the Supreme Court Monday

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Per your link...

n May of 1987, a car accident left seventeen year old Christine Busalacchi with severe head trauma that required removal of part of the brain (Bowden 1). Ms. Busalacchi was classified as in a “persistent vegetative state” in 1987 (Bowden 1). A gastrostomy feeding and hydration tube was surgically inserted into Ms. Busalacchi in 1987 (Bowden 1). The hospital she was at informed her guardian, her father, Peter Busalacchi, that she was going to be discharged and recommended that she be placed in a nursing facility (Bowden 1). Her father found a facility in Minnesota that would take Ms. Busalacchi (Bowden 2). In 1990 The State of Missouri used a restraining order to prevent Mr. Busalacchi from removing his daughter from the state and to prevent the removal of the tube (Bowden 2). The state claimed that Mr. Busalacchi was just moving his daughter to Minnesota because he would be able to remove the tube in Minnesota (Bowden 2). The case was taken to trial where the State of Missouri tried to show that Ms. Busalacchi was not in a persistent vegetative state and that she was improving (Bowden 2). They also claimed that she could receive all of the evaluations in Missouri and did not need to be moved to Minnesota (Bowden 2). Mr. Busalacchi presented to the court the denials he had received from the hospital of further evaluation of his daughter’s condition (Bowden 2). He also explained that in Minnesota all of the tests would be run under the “supervision of a nationally renowned neurologist” (Bowden 2). He stated that it wouldn’t be until after the completed evaluation that he would consider removing the tube and only under a doctor’s recommendation (Bowden 2). “The trial court found that removal of the feeding tube was not the sole purpose of the proposed move and refused to grant the permanent injunctions that the state had requested,” allowing Mr. Busalacchi the freedom to have his daughter transferred to Minnesota (Bowden 2). The Missouri Court of Appeals reversed the trial court’s decision and ordered them to reconsider the evidence (Bowden 3).

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It was so refreshing to be informed on this thread that there are thousands of women who are just delighted that they "chose" to butcher their babies./sarcasm off

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“This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and... if I think of human beings I've known and of my own life, such as it is, I can't recall any case of pain which didn't, on the whole, enrich life.” -- Malcolm Muggeridge

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And an excerpt from your NYT link...

Unlike Miss Cruzan, who had said to co-workers before her accident that she would not want to live like "a vegetable," Christine Busalacchi, only 17 at the time of her accident, had never discussed matters of life and death, her father said. Another Legal Battle

Miss Cruzan died at the rehabilitation center Wednesday, after her family won the last of their legal fights to have her feeding tube removed.

Miss Busalacchi remains connected to a feeding tube as her case has become embroiled in the latest right-to-die legal battle.

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They usuals showed up!

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They = the

[wagglebee]

Well, I'm sure that "loving" spouses like Michael Schiavo also are happy to have their "problem" behind them so they can "get on with their lives."

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It is clear that the Pete Busalacchi intended to kill his daughter -- by visiting old reliable Ronnie Cranford! -- and that Donald Lamkins, the director of the Missouri facility where Christine was a patient, was well aware of the father's plans. Lamkins probably knew all about Cranford, too, eh? Funny that eight or ten years later, George Greer still hadn't heard about Cranford. And of course never SUSPECTED that Felos would "import" a hit man from Minnesota to obstruct justice in a Florida court.

Terri had been in the hospital ten months when Cruzan was put to death and Busalacchi was TIME's cover girl for the next execution. Michael was soaking it all in. I wonder how long it took for him to start shopping a malpractice suit?