Terri Schiavo's Brother: Misinformation About Her Euthanasia Death Remains

Princeton, NJ (LifeNews.com) -- Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby Schindler has been on a speaking tour this week that's taking him to colleges and universities across the country. Schindler was at Princeton University on Tuesday and he told students there that misconceptions still exist about his sister's euthanasia death.

Terri died in March 2005 after her former husband won a court order to take her life despite requests from the Schindler family to provide her with medical and rehabilitative care.

Though more than three years have passed since the Schindler family's lost their years-long legal battle to save her life, Schindler says the public still wrongly believes some of the misnomers that appeared in the media.

Though Terri was not on artificial respiration and not in a persistent vegetative state, Schindler told the students many Americans still think that was the case and that Terri had no interaction with his family and that she had some sort of terminal illness.

Though “much confusion still exists about Terri’s condition, Terri was not terminal or dying, and her brain injury was not going to cause her to die,” Schindler said, according to a Daily Princeton report.

He said Michael Schiavo, who is now remarried to the woman he dated during the debate over Terri's life, also made up his mind about Terri's condition without basing his opinion on the facts.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Michael [Schiavo] fabricated the [death] wishes and that his brother and sister did as well and that they perjured themselves in front of the judges,” the newspaper said Schindler said.

Schindler told the students he's worried about the long-lasting effects of the debate surrounding his sister and that more Americans will see disabled people like Terri as a "non-person."

“There is no such thing as a person who is a non-person. There is no one so disabled that they have lost their value or dignity,” Schindler said. He said such a view would be akin to “walk[ing] down the same path that led to the Nuremberg trials.”

“Once you achieve emotional distance from people who are ‘different’ from you, it is easy to look the other way while they are being killed,” he added.

Ultimately, according to the Princeton newspaper, Schindler said Americans need to stand up and fight for the disabled, terminally ill and others who are in jeopardy of becoming the next victims of euthanasia.

“We need to fight today to protect those among us who need our care,” Schindler said. “It’s our dream in the future that legal bigotry against the disabled will be as taboo as insulting someone’s ethnicity."

Related web sites:
Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation - http://www.terrisfight.org

Please do not take me wrong. I offer edification.

I have been reading your posts and something bothers me. It bothers me even more since you have been a Special Ed teacher and our own son for many years was lucky when he even got Special Ed. What bothers me the most is how you shout from the rooftops how you are pro-life conservative, how you then are presented with pro-life thoughts, and you reject them, embracing instead the views of the far left.

Something is Not Quite Right (NKR).What you are displaying is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance, a hallmark of liberal thought whereby two diametrically conflicting thoughts may be embraced together. Example, weeping over baby seals during a late term abortion. In this instance:

1. Death embracers are opposite to pro-lifers. They want us to go away. Pro-lifers want to keep fighting to protect the lives of innocents the death embracers want to kill. You support both.

2. The far left, including communists and socialists tell us to move on, that this is a private family matter, that we should let it go. We hear this every day from the media from all voices of the far left, and if anyone doubts, they may simply read the past years of Terri Dailies to see just how many times every one of these feeble rants of the far left are repeated.

You repeated almost every one as if it were your own thinking. And you claim in one breath you are pro-life and in the next breath you subscribe to pure leftist thought.

How do you manage with both? Liberals do, with cognitive dissonance.

I am pointing this out to you in real hopes you realize how you look when you say these things and maybe learn something about your own thought process. Since you were associated with Special Ed you saw plenty of potential victims the death gang would drool to snuff yet you were there to help them.

Maybe an incident bothered you and caused you to wish to slam the door on it all. Maybe that is why our persistence in fighting those death lovers is upsetting you. If so, we are here to help. I have gone through much of this myself. Many is the time I wished to slam the door on this topic, but I cannot, am obliged to face it. I am obliged by my faith.

I don't expect you to join us, to immerse yourself in our work, wish merely that you see yourself.

8mm

You seem to have read so many Terri threads that you're tired of them, and yet you don't seem to have comprehended the main points:

You keep referring to "life support," but the law traditionally and properly makes a meaningful distinction between "life support" (which is an extraordinary medical intervention) and "nutrition and hydration" (which is a universal human need). This was subverted in the Schiavo case.
You keep saying that it was properly a private family matter, but the fact is that her family (mother, father, brother and sister) were unanimous about wanting to assume responsibility for care for their disabled family member, and were prevented from doing so by her estranged husband with the support of intrusive government (courts) who colluded in her killing by starvation/dehydration ---despite her family.
You keep insisting that this is of no more importance to any of us, when in fact it establishes a precedent which is going to hunt down and kill thousands or tens of thousands of us unless we get it overturned in the laws, in the courts, and in the forum of public opinion.

I find myself obliged to go a lawyer's office on Monday to swear out a "Will to Live" (the National Right to Life's model document comparable to a Living Will).

I've got serious surgery coming up, and I want to clarify in the strongest terms that I do authorize the termination of extraordinary medical interventions a.k.a. "life support" if something went seriously awry and further intervention became burdensome and futile, but I do not (and morally cannot) authorize my deliberate killing by starvation/dehydration by the cessation of feeding by spoon, straw, tube, or whatever means.

(Not that my husband, brother or son --- my legal health proxies --- would ever kill me in such a way, since they are moral decent people: but anyone is well advised to get it in writing.)

So you see it's STILL a life-or-death question for me, personally: and for all of us, if we're paying attention.

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