Right to lifers gone amok. (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20050224/ap_on_re_us/brain_damaged_woman)

Somehow, I don't think this is what most "lifers" really have in mind when they argue against euthanasia. Withdrawing life support would allow Terri to die a natural death. It's not murder when you stop extraordinary measures to keep the heart and lungs going.

I think this has everything to do with delusional parents wishing beyond reason for their daughter back. It's about a rabid group taking advantage of the delusion and political hacks like Jeb Bush piling on for political leverage. It's gone on long enough it's beyond sick.

Deluded parents can be annoying when they don't have touch with reality. Let 'em die, folks.

No villains in this sad story
By RICK CASEY
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

If any of you think Texas Children's Hospital is hard-hearted in going to court to seek to take 4 1/2 -month-old Sun Hudson off life-support machines, consider this:

Texas law allowed them to do it months ago without going to court. What's more, some experts in medical ethics consider the Texas law to be a model.

If you haven't kept up with the story, Sun was born with a form of dwarfism that is almost always fatal not long after birth. What's more, it typically restricts the growth of the rib cage and lungs, so that as the rest of the baby grows he slowly suffocates.

Doctors at Texas Children's came to the conclusion last November that keeping Sun on a ventilator would only delay his death, possibly painfully.

But Wanda Hudson, the baby's mother, insisted that Sun be kept alive. Discussions with her did not get far. Among other things, she says her son was not conceived by a man but by the sun and that he will never die.

Last week, Probate Judge William McCulloch lifted an order barring doctors from removing Sun from the ventilator. That the order was put in place in the first place was somewhat extraordinary.


No takers for case
Under a law passed in 1999 and refined two years ago, the hospital had a clear process under which it could take the action it deemed best without going to court.

It was required to give the mother at least 48 hours' notice that a meeting on the doctors' recommendation would be held by the hospital's standing ethics committee.

She would be permitted to participate in the meeting if she chose. If the committee agreed with the doctors, which it did, the hospital was required to make a good faith effort to find a physician or a facility that would take over care of the baby. If none could be found within 10 days, the hospital could remove the baby from the ventilator.

Instead, the hospital offered to pay for a lawyer for Hudson so she could take the case before a judge.

Hospital officials say they contacted 40 institutions, but none would take the baby. Nor has any doctor or institution come forward in the wake of considerable publicity.

John Paris, Walsh Professor of Bioethics at Boston College and a leading expert on end-of-life issues, calls the Texas law "a terrific statute." He says only California has a similar law.

The virtue of the law, he said, is that it is based on a reasonable process, not on heart-wrenching questions of whether the child can live and, if so, what kind of a life he will have.


Mothers cry, judges punt
"The problem is that very, very few judges will order the cessation of life-sustaining treatment in the face of a crying mother," he said. "The judge says, 'They don't pay me enough to do this.' He figures whichever way he rules, his decision will be appealed. The appeals judges, who don't have the mother in front of them, can make the decision."

The Texas law supposes that if no other doctor or institution will take the patient, then the doctors and ethics committee that dealt with it are very likely to be right.

Paris said in such cases, doctors are not "playing God," but trying to be ethical. And the notion that letting a person die may be the right thing to do is not new.

In one of the papers he has authored or co-authored on the question, Paris quoted Hippocrates: "To impose treatment on the patient overmastered by disease is to display an ignorance akin to madness."

Paris says another argument for the law is that family members are often paralyzed by such a decision. They are afraid of the guilt associated with the responsibility of choosing death.


Looking out for parent
Joan Krause, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center and co-director of the Center's Health Law and Policy Institute, said she thought Texas Children's was taking a chance with this case out of "a concern whether the mother truly appreciates what is happening."

This is Texas, she said. They might have found a judge who would say, "The statute allowed you to do that but you took a different route and now I'm going to order you to continue."

Hudson's lawyer, providing vigorous representation, is appealing Judge McCulloch's decision. An expedited hearing is scheduled Tuesday at Houston's 1st Court of Appeals.

Then, perhaps, this sad story with no villains will come to an end.

I hadn't heard of the Hudson case before. What a bizarre situation.

I hope you all have written instructions. Both Judy and I have a section in our Living Trust notebook that makes it clear - when all hope is gone, pull the friggen' plug. I don't want pictures of Bernie Unger the Vegetable to be plastered on the national news every week.

Both these stories are so sad but if a machine is keeping you alive and you don't have any brain function. then that's not life (at least I think so)

Why live in a state of "nothing"...it's so sad really...

That's the mother who also claims she "communicates" with the baby "telepathically." Poor baby. Even if he was to survive, what kind of mother would she be?

I don't want to sound heartless but who the hell is payng for her medical bills?

I think the husband (or his insurance co.) shouldn't be held responsible. Neither should the tax payer. I think the parents should be taking care of this since they are the ones wanting to keep her alive. The state has to take some responsibility also but it has been the parents that have caused most of this heartwrenching debate.

Ok, I'm off my soap box!

That's the mother who also claims she "communicates" with the baby "telepathically." Poor baby. Even if he was to survive, what kind of mother would she be?

She might have some sort of post partom (my spelling skills are suspect at best) depression or something. I have an aunt in Cuba that (from what I'm told) kind of get's nuts after having a baby. It's happend twice to her and my family in Cuba just take care of the baby for a few weeks or a month before she is OK again and back to normal.

Very strange...but it happens...

I don't want to sound heartless but who the hell is payng for her medical bills?

I think the husband (or his insurance co.) shouldn't be held responsible. Neither should the tax payer. I think the parents should be taking care of this since they are the ones wanting to keep her alive. The state has to take some responsibility also but it has been the parents that have caused most of this heartwrenching debate.

Ok, I'm off my soap box!

Ok sorry couldn't help it... all the letters they sent to her husband burnt up on the way there...


(note she claims the Sun is the father of her son )

Terri is right here in my county.

From the New Yorker, April 4, 2005

COMMENT
MATTERS OF LIFE
by Hendrik Hertzberg
Issue of 2005-04-04
Posted 2005-03-28


Last week, Theresa Marie Schindler Schiavo, known to cable-news viewers and talk-radio listeners as Terri, was as ubiquitous as Elián González and Laci Peterson once were. Yet she was also hidden, obscured behind layers of political and religious posturing, legal maneuvering, emotional projection, and media exploitation that swaddled her like strips of linen around a mummy.

Terri Schiavo was born on December 3, 1963, near Philadelphia, the first of three children of Robert and Mary Schindler. As a teen-ager, she was obese—at eighteen, she weighed two hundred and fifty pounds—but with diligence she lost a hundred pounds, and by the time she married Michael Schiavo, in 1984, she was an attractive and vivacious young woman. By the end of the decade, she had moved with her husband to Florida, was undergoing fertility treatments, and had slimmed down further, to a hundred and ten pounds. On February 25, 1990, Terri suffered cardiac arrest, leading to severe brain damage. The cause was a drastically reduced level of potassium in her bloodstream, a condition frequently associated with bulimia. Her death that day was forestalled by heroic measures, including a tracheotomy and ventilation. But when, after a few weeks, she emerged from a coma, it was only to enter a “persistent vegetative state,” with no evidence or hope of improvement—a diagnosis that, in the fifteen years since, has been confirmed, with something close to unanimity, by many neurologists on many occasions on behalf of many courts. The principal internal organs of Terri’s body, including her brain stem, which controls such involuntary actions as heartbeat, digestion, respiration, and the bodily sleep cycle, continued to function as long as liquid nourishment was provided through a tube threaded into her stomach through a hole in her abdomen. The exception was her cerebral cortex, which is the seat of language, of the processing of sense impressions, of thought, of awareness of one’s surroundings and one’s inner state—in short, of consciousness. Her EKG flatlined. The body lived; the mind died. “At this point,” the Florida Supreme Court wrote six months ago, “much of her cerebral cortex is simply gone and has been replaced by cerebral spinal fluid. Medicine cannot cure this condition. Unless an act of God, a true miracle, were to recreate her brain, Theresa will always remain in an unconscious, reflexive state.”

Terri Schiavo’s life, as distinct from the life of her unsentient organs, ended fifteen years ago. But that did not prevent her from becoming the star of an unusually morbid kind of reality TV show. The show was made possible by two factors. The first was a bitter struggle between Terri’s husband, Michael Schiavo, who wanted to allow her body to die in accordance with what he said, and what an unbroken series of court decisions has affirmed, was her own expressed wish, and her parents and siblings, who wanted to keep her body alive at all costs. The second factor was a set of video snippets, provided by the Schindler family and broadcast incessantly by the three cable news networks—CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC—which are themselves entangled in a desperate struggle for dominance. Sometimes the snippets are identified by the year of their taping (2001 and 2002); sometimes they are not. Sometimes they are accompanied by inflammatory captions (fighting for her life); sometimes the captions are merely dramatic (schiavo saga). They show Terri’s blinking eyes seeming to follow a balloon waved in front of her; or her mouth agape in a rictus that could be interpreted as a smile; or her face turned toward her mother’s, with her head thrown back, Pietà-like. As neurologists who have examined her have explained, the snippets are profoundly misleading. A few seconds of maximum suggestiveness culled from many hours of tape, they are more in the nature of special effects than of a documentary record. Without them, there would have been no show—and, most likely, no televised vigils outside her hospice, no cries of “murder” from Tom DeLay, the egregious House Majority Leader; no midnight special sessions of the House and Senate; no calling Dr. Frist for a snap video diagnosis; no visuals of President Bush returning from Texas to land on the White House south lawn, striding dramatically across the grass as if it were the deck of an aircraft carrier.

To read through the documents generated by the years of legal wrangling over Terri Schiavo is to be impressed by the thoroughness and conscientiousness with which the courts, especially the Florida courts, approached her case. On legal, substantive, and constitutional grounds, they seemed to have reason and justice on their side. Yet it was a cold sort of reason and justice. On a human level, it was hard to see what concrete harm there could be in indulging her family’s desire to keep her body alive, its care presumably underwritten by the hospice and the family’s supporters.

Meanwhile, the language of the debate over her fate, pitting a “right to die” against a “right to life,” turned rancid in its abstraction. Terri Schiavo, the person, had no further use for a right to die, because Terri Schiavo, the person, had long since exercised that right. Did it really matter if she had told her husband, when she was young and healthy, that she would not wish to live “that way”? Her body notwithstanding, she was not living “that way,” or any other way. By the same token, she had no use for a right to life, because her ability to benefit from such a right had long ago been rendered as moot as the legal pleadings on her alleged behalf would soon become.

As the week progressed, it was harder and harder to deny that the fervor of Terri’s Christianist “supporters” was motivated by dogmas unrelated to her or her rights. If she truly had a “right to life,” if removing her feeding tube was truly tantamount to murder, then neither the disapproval nor the approval of her family (or anyone else) could make the slightest moral difference. If her parents had agreed with her husband that the tube should be removed, would their acquiescence have somehow transubstantiated murder into mercy? And, with or without their acquiescence, if Michael Schiavo had spent the last ten years adhering strictly to the orthodox code of family values—if he had remained faithfully celibate, if he had not taken a mistress and had children with her—then might not some of those now accusing him of murder be demanding that his Biblically ordained husbandly authority be respected?

Terri Schiavo has become a metaphor in the religio-cultural struggle over abortion. This—along with the advantages of demonizing the judiciary in preparation for the coming battle over Supreme Court nominees—explains the eagerness of Republican politicians to embrace her parents’ cause. Her lack of awareness actually increased her metaphoric usefulness. Like a sixty-four-cell blastocyst, she was without consciousness. Unlike the blastocyst, she was without potential. If letting her body die is murder, goes the logic, then thwarting the development of the blastocyst can surely be nothing less.

Last weekend, as Good Friday gave way to Holy Saturday and Holy Saturday to Easter Sunday, Florida’s made-for-TV passion play neared its climax. The death of Terri Schiavo’s body will only enhance her symbolic value, elevating her to her destined place as another martyr in this dismal age of martyrs.

Two things here. First, I'm not convinced about the reports of her lacking any consciousness. Doctors from both sides seem biased accordingly. Court appointed examination insufficient in time, ridiculous. All doctors so far dime a dozen. Second, if the parents want to raise the money to foot her medical bills to keep her alive, I don't see why the husband won't acquiesce. The husband first brought up Terri's "desire" 7 years into the process, indicating questionable motive. Regardless, why not let the parents?

I'm sure if Terri Schiavo had any ability to understand, she would be horrified at this turn in her life's events.

And when her soul leaves this earth, and ascends and she gains awareness again of the last years, she will only be able to shake her head in wonder.

The entire situation is a crying shame on so many levels:

1) That a beautiful young woman had a heart attack that essentially took her life
2) That a family who was once close (Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents) were torn apart by conflict that's basically about money
3) That whatever wishes she conveyed to Michael took so long to carry out
4) That certain people within our goverenment latched onto her like the day's newly minted penny, acted like imbeciles, enacted legislation that violated the constitution as part of a great grandstand play, and when they found out their hand had a deuce, a three, a four, a six and a nine, dropped her situation like a hot potato. Where are all those hand-wringing idiots now? I don't see Tom DeLay, President DUBYA and the other assholes down there now, or even commenting on this anymore, now that they noticed the opinion polls showed that the public generally had disdain for that grandstand play. Man, and they painted Kerry as a flipflopper.
5) That this has become a grandstand play for the right to lifers, yet there are probably more than a hundred similar cases going on in hospitals around the country EVERY SINGLE DAY. They are only focused on this one because there are TV cameras involved.

The entire situation sickens me. The only one I care about is Terri and I hope God gives her a speed relief to her suffering.

I'm sure if Terri Schiavo had any ability to understand, she would be horrified at this turn in her life's events.

And when her soul leaves this earth, and ascends and she gains awareness again of the last years, she will only be able to shake her head in wonder.

The entire situation is a crying shame on so many levels:

1) That a beautiful young woman had a heart attack that essentially took her life
2) That a family who was once close (Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents) were torn apart by conflict that's basically about money
3) That whatever wishes she conveyed to Michael took so long to carry out
4) That certain people within our goverenment latched onto her like the day's newly minted penny, acted like imbeciles, enacted legislation that violated the constitution as part of a great grandstand play, and when they found out their hand had a deuce, a three, a four, a six and a nine, dropped her situation like a hot potato. Where are all those hand-wringing idiots now? I don't see Tom DeLay, President DUBYA and the other assholes down there now, or even commenting on this anymore, now that they noticed the opinion polls showed that the public generally had disdain for that grandstand play. Man, and they painted Kerry as a flipflopper.
5) That this has become a grandstand play for the right to lifers, yet there are probably more than a hundred similar cases going on in hospitals around the country EVERY SINGLE DAY. They are only focused on this one because there are TV cameras involved.

The entire situation sickens me. The only one I care about is Terri and I hope God gives her a speed relief to her suffering.

You are absolutely right.

You know, I don't normally get involved in controversial threads (ahem), but this one I will.

My wife and I are going through the process of having our wills done up. I was interviewed by the lawyer Tuesday. I told him if my time comes and my life is sustained by artificial means, PULL THE PLUG. And, more to the point, my wife, whom I swore vows of "to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, til death do us part", has my COMPLETE confidence and authority to make that decision when and IF she's called upon to do so.

My father died of cancer, which had spread to most major organs of his body. The decision was made to allow him to pass. He was on a strong morphine drip and his feeding tube was removed. What was our alternative? To allow him to linger on, dead to the world and on strong drugs to ease his suffering? I don't think so....

My real point here is, IT'S A FAMILY'S PRIVATE DECISION. What we choose to do during those last few weeks is our business, nobody elses. Terri Schiavo placed her trust and confidence in her husband, to do the right thing and communicated with him her desires. IT'S NOBODY ELSE'S BUSINESS.

Whatever the outcome of this most public family drama, I pray Terri and everyone involved find peace.

You know, I don't normally get involved in controversial threads (ahem), but this one I will.

My wife and I are going through the process of having our wills done up. I was interviewed by the lawyer Tuesday. I told him if my time comes and my life is sustained by artificial means, PULL THE PLUG. And, more to the point, my wife, whom I swore vows of "to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, til death do us part", has my COMPLETE confidence and authority to make that decision when and IF she's called upon to do so.

My father died of cancer, which had spread to most major organs of his body. The decision was made to allow him to pass. He was on a strong morphine drip and his feeding tube was removed. What was our alternative? To allow him to linger on, dead to the world and on strong drugs to ease his suffering? I don't think so....

My real point here is, IT'S A FAMILY'S PRIVATE DECISION. What we choose to do during those last few weeks is our business, nobody elses. Terri Schiavo placed her trust and confidence in her husband, to do the right thing and communicated with him her desires. IT'S NOBODY ELSE'S BUSINESS.

Whatever the outcome of this most public family drama, I pray Terri and everyone involved find peace.

You got to help make the decision for your dad. Terri Schiavo's family had no input. The husband decided everything, which the law dictates. Death, cremation, location of burial- all decided by the husband in disagreement with the parents. He wouldn't even allow any of the family members to be there during Terri's last moments. The only thing he has allowed is an autopsy, which he hopes will vindicate him as far as PVS and physical abuse. Can you imagine if, for example, your dad's 2nd wife (your step mom), if that were the case, not allowing you access or decision-making with your dad?

He wouldn't even allow any of the family members to be there during Terri's last moments.

Depends on who you listen to.

Just curious--Why did we need another Terri Schiavo thread?

Edit--I see that this is an old one, dredged up. My bad.

Just curious--Why did we need another Terri Schiavo thread?

Why do we not need another thread? We think, therefore we are. If we are, then why not think. And you are indeed thinking, which means your question is valid. Therefore why not whichever. Can you disprove what I have said?

Why do we not need another thread? We think, therefore we are. If we are, then why not think. And you are indeed thinking, which means your question is valid. Therefore why not whichever. Can you disprove what I have said?Heck no! I don't even know what you just said, so I certainly can't disprove it! :)