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