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Kate Adamson was thought to be "unconscious" but felt every minute of her excruciating period of dehydration and starvation. We dehydrate to death helpless people to death in this country because they have a catastrophic cognitive impairment. Advocates for dehydration say it is just medical ethics, the withdrawal of the medical treatment of tube feeding. (Now, there is even a lawsuit to compel starvation by withholding spoon feeding–not a medical treatment!) Dehydrating helpless people to death was once unthinkable. Then, in the 80s, bioethicists began advocating withdrawing tube-supplied food and fluids. And so it came to pass. Advocates for dehydration...

New Zealand-born Kate Adamson-Klugman experienced a double brainstem stroke in 1995 at the age of 33. She was helpless and completely paralyzed, suffering from "locked-in syn­drome." Kate thought she was clear in her own mind about what she would want if she ever experienced a catastrophic injury or illness. She knew she would face death bravely; she wanted no heroics. But as she lay in an intensive care unit, listening to the doctors talk about her own impending death and their plans not to treat her, her ideas of medical aid toward incapacitated persons drastically changed. Her own will to...

Many who support Terri Schiavo's threatened dehydration assert that removing a feeding tube from a profoundly cognitively disabled person results in a painless and gentle ending. But is this really true? After all, it would be agonizing if you or I were locked in a room for two weeks and deprived of all food and water. ======= So, why should we believe that cognitively disabled patients experience the deprivation differently simply because they receive nourishment through a feeding tube instead of by mouth? An accurate discussion of this sensitive issue requires the making of proper and nuanced distinctions about the...

Continuation of Terri Schiavo daily March threads. Due to overwhelming participation we reached over 5000 posts in three days time!

With time growing short, activists rally to save Terri Schiavo PINELLAS PARK, Fla. (AP) - Buoyed by encouragement from actor Mel Gibson, the family of Terri Schiavo joined a rally today pleading for her life, just days before the court-ordered removal of her feeding tube. Video Story About 200 people prayed and sang outside the hospice where the 41-year-old brain-damaged woman lives. Schiavo can breathe on her own, but depends on a tube in her abdomen for food and water. She has been at the center of a long and bitter court battle: Her husband says she wouldn't want to...

Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - A woman who knows better than most what Terri Schiavo is going through, says the disabled Florida woman's husband should stop treading in God's territory by seeking her death. "I support life over death, human dignity over indifference," says Kate Anderson. "I support the value of each person regardless of that person's disability." Eight years ago, Adamson was lying in a U.S. hospital intensive care unit after a near-fatal brainstem stroke. Doctors described her as being in a "vegetative" state. Unable to move or communicate, yet fully aware and sensitive to hunger and pain,...