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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/26/2005 1:28:22 AM | True fordgirl.
The bigger issue here that's has barely been touched upon is just how much control of our lives and the lives of our loved ones should we surrender to our government?
It's regrettable that anyone should have to endure what Terri has gone through. What would be even more regrettable is for the judges and court system to step in and set a legal precedent which would allow anyone who did not agree with a decision of the next of kin to more easily challenge them. In this one respect, our court system seems to know what it's doing by not granting the motions of the parents or agreeing to hear their appeals.
We have to keep our focus on the "big picture" here and need not be swayed to change our structure based on single or extremely rare situations no matter how emotionally compelling. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/26/2005 7:21:06 AM |
The problem is that, contrary to what ABC News told those polled, Terri Schiavo is not on "life support" and has never been on "life support." The loaded phrase evokes images of a comatose patient being artificially sustained by myriad machines and pumps and wires. Terri was on a feeding tube. A feeding tube is not a ventilator. Terri can breathe just fine on her own.
And from the dictionary
equipment, material, and treatment needed to keep a seriously ill or injured patient alive | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/26/2005 11:38:05 AM | Two big questions of what is being aimed for :
What do the parents want done ?
What does the spouse want done ?
Too much information left out of what the media says. | |
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nikkiw
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Joined: 2/23/2005
Msg: 29 | |
| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/26/2005 5:48:13 PM | Very true, Terri was not on life support, she was on a feeding tube. That's because her brainstem is still attached and can still keep her body functions active to where she can sustain physical health. However, Terri has no emotive health whatsoever. She cannot speak, she cannot cry, laugh, etc based on emotion because she has none. She is reacting purely reactionary, not emotive.
Can someone tell me if this is right or wrong: I heard on talk radio yesterday that this was all started by an obsession with weight loss...Terri was starving herself. If this is the case, and physical beauty really was that important to her, who in their right mind would want to keep her alive 14 years past when the "perminant vegetative state" diagnosis is given, and allow her to become the specticle that this has turned into. Let her go.
Oh, and they're catholic, so they believe Heaven is her afterlife. Why would you want to hold a braindead woman here rather than allowing her to pass on to Heaven? I'm sorry, but it sounds a bit selfish to me. Hang on tooth and nail to see if maybe...just MAYBE she'll wake up and we can start the lifelong rehabilitation process that will prove to be nothing but heartache and difficulty, or allow her to move on with some dignity into an eternity of peace? Just not sure I see the families point here. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/26/2005 10:31:30 PM | nikkiw... the feeding tube is a form of "life support". without the feeding tube she will die. yes, terri suffered from bulimia, which caused her to have a heart attack. you're right... they should let her go given she will never have any quality of life. the problem is... and i'll quote some info. for you... is... her parents are of the catholic faith and that faith does not support the removal of the feeding tube because:
"As Christians, our faith shapes our attitude toward sickness and death in three important ways. First, we believe that human life is good. Human life is a gift from God to be cherished and respected because every human being is created in the image and likeness of God (Gn 1:26). Our Church teaches that we are stewards of life and in heeding God’s command, "Thou shall not kill" (Ex 20:13), we recognize that we cannot dispose of life as we please."
"Second, we believe that the Son of God became man to reconcile us with the Father and to be our model of holiness (Mt 11:29). His sacrifice of himself is the model of the new law, "Love one another as I have loved you" (Jn 15:12). By living among us, Jesus has created a new communion or solidarity among us (1 Cor 12:26-27), making everyone a neighbor worthy of our charity and care (Lk 10:25-36)."
"Third, we believe that we are redeemed by Christ and called to share eternal life with him. The Christian vision of death is expressed in the funeral liturgy when we pray: "Lord, for your faithful people life is changed, not ended. When the body of our earthly dwelling lies in death we gain an everlasting dwelling place in heaven" (Preface for Christian Death I)."
this is from a catholic web site and there's lots of info. on terri's case specifically if you want to check it out from the religious standpoint.
http://www.americancatholic.org/Newsletters/CU/ac0897.asp | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/28/2005 10:13:54 AM | The religous right is sooooo hypocritical.
When George Bush was govenor of Texas he signed a bill allowing the hosiptal to cut off life support if the patients family could no longer pay the bill. Now he all of a sudden respects life ?
Money to invade Iraq and tax cuts for the very riches but millions of americans without health insurance. Oh yeah, lots of respect for life.
100,000 dead civilians in Iraq and this is respect for life ?
The Christian Taliban ruling the US is disgraceful. What ever happened to allowing some dignity in death. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/28/2005 10:32:30 AM | Kitty, I'm still waiting for you to post all those "bets" I made with you. Don't be shy, now...
Anyway, if a feeding tube is a form of life support, then our throat is a form of life support. And our mouth, and a piece of food, and trees and plants, and etc. We need all these things to live. The argument seems to be boiling down now:
The right to life
vs.
The quality of life
The Right to lifers want everyone to live, because it's better than being dead. and, the quality of lifers wants to be able to arbitrarily choose who should live and die, based on their opinions, regardless of how others feel. We keep hearing "She can't do this and she can't do that" from people who have never met her, have absolutely no medical background, and have no possible way of knowing what her capacities are/where. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/28/2005 11:09:54 AM | | I want to tatoo my ass with "If you have to wipe this for more than 2 weeks, kill me". | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/28/2005 9:32:09 PM | | i'm with paddler!!! it's not enough to go through what terri is going through than to have her humiliated in her last moments by continually airing this personal matter to the world. this private matter should have never been brought to the public's eye. let her die peacefully with what little bit of dignity she has left and move on people, it's not our business. i would have never allowed this to happen to anyone in my family... this has become the equivalent of a circus sideshow act. it's one thing to discuss our opinions but it's quite another to interfere in personal family matters. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/28/2005 9:47:32 PM | | I am still trying to understand why they are starving this poor woman to death? How is this humane? I certainly no expert , but anyone who has watched any of the news footage should be able to see that she is NOT in a total vegetative state. What I mean is, look at the foot age where it shows a family member by her side, you can plainly see that she is aware of them and is happy thta they are there. She doesn't have to say it with words , you can look at her eyes and tell that she acknowledges her family. I thought it was a random response at first , but it is consistant in every footage clip of her . How far gone are we when it is legal to make some innocent helpless person die of starvation, and arrest those who want to try to save her? It just doesn't sound"right". | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 12:01:10 AM |
it's not enough to go through what terri is going through than to have her humiliated in her last moments by continually airing this personal matter to the world.
How can she be humiliated if she has no thoughts? Are you saying that she has emotions? Doesn't that amount to murder? | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 5:48:51 AM |
What I mean is, look at the foot age where it shows a family member by her side, you can plainly see that she is aware of them and is happy thta they are there.
What they aren't telling you when they show that footage is that it is from 10 or 12 years ago. They won't show footage from now. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 6:20:45 AM | | exactly terry... they show you old footage that took them years of recording to obtain and then they only show you the few seconds of footage to try to tug at your heart strings as if she's constantly communicating with her family and she's not. terri belts out the sounds "aaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh wwwwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaa" and they interpret that to mean she wants to live. come freakin' on people... THAT'S ALL SHE'S SAID FOR 15 YEARS! those who are easily brainwashed will fall for these tricks... others who are familiar with these tactics are too smart to fall for that crap. h-e-l-l, if she can say(like these people profess she does) that she wants to live so bad, why couldn't she have been trying to say "aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh wwwwwwwwaaaaaaaaaana die alreay would you just pull the feeding tube and be done with it! the family loves her and that's why they interpret every movement and sound the way they do. they are not unbiased in this situation and don't want to let go of their daughter... it's gotten beyond a selfish act on her parents part at this point. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 6:29:25 AM | I want to tatoo my ass with "If you have to wipe this for more than 2 weeks, kill me".
No kidding. One thing I have gotten out of all this is to get my living will
going.... no way am I going to be a potential media circus for the
Religious Right, Pro-Lifers and their political kiss-a$$es in Congress.
This whole thing is ridiculous.  | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 6:39:42 AM | and for your questions bulldog... if my son ever put me on public display like that, whether i was aware of it or not, he knows for a fact that it would be humiliating and i'd come back to haunt him if he ever did something that hienous to me! he knows that i would not want my loved ones, family, friends or even perfect strangers to see me in that state, hence it would be humiliating to me. ever had someone say to you "he would turn over in his grave if he knew what you were doing?" well... that's what i'm gettin' at here... it doesn't matter whether you are dead or alive, concious or not... you should always respect your family and protect them from this sort of public humiliation. terri was once a very vain, and pretty woman and she's now been reduced to a human snow globe being paraded around on tv in her pajamas, with no control over her body or actions... people outside of her family did not need to see her in that state. that was a private matter. you obviously have no respect for other people, living or dead, if you think putting your family member in the media circus as has been done in terri's case, is acceptable. in my family... dead or alive, you are respected at the highest level, no matter what the circumstances. we don't dececrate the dead and we d-a-m-n sure don't dececrate/humiliate the living for that matter and if that's that incredibly hard for you to understand... that's your problem and i pity you and your family for having not achieved any respect for one another or each others privacy.
and don't ask me any more stupid questions... i'm not answering any more of them bulldog... you're just rediculously immature. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 8:34:40 AM | | Everyone on here makes a valid point . Since I didn't know that ALL of the footage is old ,I will assume that that is true, but consider this , who knows this lady better than any other person, the judges? politicians? or her parents? her parents know her better than any other person , so shouldn't they have the final say in this matter? It just seems like a scary precedent when the government has the final say in determining whether someone'own disabled son or daughter should live or die. How can any person know what's best for her more that her own parents? I was also wondering if anyone read the other thread relating to this subject? go to the main forum search and type in water then at the top it should display a thread called "arrested for bringing a dying woman a bottle of water" page1 first post, if those things are true ,then that even makes this whole story more sad,and wrong. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 10:30:28 AM |
who knows this lady better than any other person, the judges? politicians? or her parents?
At this point there is nobody in there to know. All she is is a husk with a brain stem and mush. She can't take in nourishment other than through a feeding tube because there isn't enough brain to make her body work the way it is supposed to. I can't imagine anyone wanting to have their family and loved ones put through the extended pain, suffering, and anguish that her husband, parents, and the rest of her family have been put through the last 15 years.
It would be different if there was any chance that she could come out of it but at this point the doctors say she can't. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 10:53:07 AM | For all of those interested in a good article overviewing the issues of her health and explanation of what has been seen in diagnostic tests and what is known about her potential or possible consciousness...this is a worthwhile read.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1112051413184&call_pageid=968332188492&col=968793972154&DPL=IvsNDS%2f7ChAX&tacodalogin=yes
Or just go to www.thestar.com and it's on the front page there. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 10:53:39 AM | | You do make a valid point, it's just that ,aren't her parents the ones that were trying to get the feeding tube re installed? They as parents ,must love her greatly, and if she is as far gone as most everyone says she is ,wouldn't they know this? That is why I wonder if they see somthing that the public doesn't, or are aware of facts that we don't know. They would have her best interests in mind above any other person. I do agree , the past 15 years must have been terrible for all of her family , but watching her starve to death in a facility that is equipped to feed her ,must be as bad if not worse. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 11:31:49 AM | Global Eye
Body Double
By Chris Floyd
Published: March 25, 2005
Far from the hurly-burly in Florida, where the Bush brothers and their shameless minions have sought to milk maximum "political capital" from the ravaged body of a brain-dead woman, the true moral values of these gilded hypocrites were on stark display last week in a quiet corner of the Bushes' adopted homeland: Texas.
This week, U.S. President George W. Bush melodramatically cut short one of his innumerable vacations and flew back to Washington to intervene in the case of Terri Schiavo when a Florida court granted her husband's request to cut off her life support after she had spent 15 years in a vegetative state. But days before, even as the president was supporting his brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush, and congressional Republicans in "defending the culture of life" in the Schiavo case, doctors in Houston were pulling the breathing tube from the throat of an ailing infant. The boy suffocated within seconds, legally killed -- against the wishes of his anguished mother -- in accordance with a draconian law signed as a "cost-saving" measure by the state's former governor: George W. Bush.
There were no frenzied protests, no camera-friendly prayer vigils, no preening politicians at Texas Children's Hospital when 5-month-old Sun Hudson took his last breath. There was only his mother, Wanda, holding him in her arms as he died, the Houston Chronicle reported. Sun suffered from an extreme form of dwarfism, which is incurable and usually fatal. Early on, doctors recommended cutting off the breathing tube that kept his undersized lungs working. He was inert, they said, unresponsive -- essentially comatose.
Wanda Hudson disagreed. "I talked to him," she said. "He was conscious." Moving, looking around, he responded to her. Although the odds were long, she wanted to give him more time to develop, not give up on him after just a few months. Wishful thinking, a despairing parent's denial? Perhaps. But the law signed by Bush in 1999 took the decision out of her hands and gave it to hospital bureaucrats, allowing them to shut down a patient's life support -- even against the wishes of the patient's family or guardian -- if the medical brass decide that treatment is "nonbeneficial," the Chronicle noted.
Indeed, why throw away good money pumping air down the gullet of some defective infant, just to mollify his nobody of a mother? For, unlike Schiavo -- a nice middle-class white woman, a political marketer's dream -- Wanda Hudson was just another worthless black woman living in poverty, unable to afford prenatal care. Who would waste a dime on trash like that? It's much more beneficial to funnel that cash into the coffers of your political patrons -- like George and Jeb, now wallowing happily in the swamp of campaign grease they get from giant medical corporations. In return, they push government policies designed to keep Big Medicine's profits sky-high while gutting public obligations to provide health care for the hoi polloi.
So the hospital invoked the Bush Law on Sun Hudson. Just as in Florida, a local judge ruled that life-support systems must be removed, and the patient allowed to die a natural death. But strangely enough, the Texas judge was not reviled in the halls of Congress as a would-be murderer, as was his counterpart in Florida -- even though the latter was carrying out the wishes of Terri Schiavo's husband, her legal guardian, while the Bush Law used state power to override a mother's choice. Nor was the Texas judge subjected to death threats like the ones the Florida judge received from Bush's "armies of compassion."
No, Sun's mother stood alone. Those compassionate armies and congressional kibitzers failed to materialize on her behalf. President Bush -- usually so eager to wade in a with a few scripted words of pursed-lipped piety about "family values" and "defending life" -- kept his big mouth shut. The hospital would not allow the media to see Sun or interview Wanda Jackson -- again, against her wishes. "I wanted y'all to see him for yourselves," she told the press after Sun's death. But so what? When nobodies die, nobody cares.
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Why the stark contrast between the two cases? Simple: There was no political hay to be made from Sun Hudson's plight. Spotlighting his situation might reflect badly on the Dear Leader -- and on the religious extremists now banking millions in contributions from their slick campaign to "save" Schiavo. For it turns out that the spearhead of Bush's Christian army in Florida, the "Right to Life" organization, actually helped Bush craft the 1999 law that took Sun Hudson's life, the Chronicle reported. The family-bashing measure was drawn up in backroom sessions between the Right-to-Lifers, Bush staffers and Big Medicine. It seems the "culture of life" ends where power politics and corporate money begin.
Bush doesn't care if Schiavo lives or dies. Her body -- like the bodies of the 100,000 Iraqis he has killed, like the bodies of the American soldiers being chewed up every day in his Babylonian conquest, like the bodies of the poor and working people whom he is methodically and remorselessly cutting off from medical care, financial protection against catastrophic illness, and legal redress against corporate predators -- is just a means to an end, the only end Bush cares about: increasing the power and wealth of his own rapacious circle of privileged elites.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, he will not do to serve this end. He'll wage war on false pretenses, he'll pervert the democratic process, he'll spit on the Constitution -- and he'll exploit the private suffering of families facing hideous dilemmas of life and death. There is no honor, no morality, no values in his "culture." | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 11:40:16 AM | I for one think that in a case such as Terri's that the parents should be the one to have the final say. After all it was them that brought her into the world and they that raised her and loved her. Too many people want their spouse out of their lives for whatever reason. Terri may or may not have told him that she'd never want to live if she was to be kept alive by artificial means or otherwise. Since there is no living will and since it is only his word that she said it, is that not hear-say? Personally I think that whoever allows her to die should be charged with something if not murder. IF she can move then she is not brain dead so therefore should be kept alive.
Anyhow I think we can debate this one for many years and still be no farther ahead than we are now. My prayers are with Terri and her family | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 1:22:31 PM | | ^^^ they usually always are! | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 1:57:14 PM | that is a good idea tattooing DNR on my chest!
Sounds like a good idea. I wouldn't want my boobs to be resuscitated. Once they're gone, I don't want them to come back. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 2:27:56 PM | Maybe the protestors shoud actually protest somewhere where the action is, dontcha think? (like a congressmans office? or medical health board? or American Health Organization? or somthing?)
sheesh, leave the poor family and health workers at her centre alone. THEY are already going throug enough turmoil and pain and battles as it is!
Wanna protest? At LEAST protest somewhere where the decisions are made...no?
fu*kin mosquitos. | |
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| Terry Schiavo
Posted: 3/29/2005 8:57:04 PM | | micxter... just food for thought... if you want your family to be able to make life & death decisions for you as you see being done in terri's case, you may never want to get married if you plan on living in the US. terri's husband... souly because he is her husband, can & has every right to make this decision for her because that's just one of the nifty benefits that comes along with the whole marriage package. another good reason to have a living will. | |
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