Terri Shiavo

[Guest bizabra]

Originally posted by Strawberry Fields+Mar 29 2005, 09:39 AM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Strawberry Fields @ Mar 29 2005, 09:39 AM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--Outshined@Mar 29 2005, 10:19 AM

The funny thing is, her husband insists on the autopsy...

Maybe and maybe not... Could it be the Florida Law states that before any cremation can take place that an autopsy is required first? I am researching that now, so if anyone else is quicker then I am let us know okay? If this is true then Felos is raising another smoke screen that his client is the one being the good guy in the final hour. It may also be that enough questions are being raised about Michael¡Çs motives that Congress is insisting on the autopsy. The worst part is that an autopsy can only happen AFTER Terri has been killed.

If Terri receives an autopsy from a reliable coronor, who has not been bought off, I wonder if Michael will be available for questioning.

Sheesh!

Maybe, might, could be, blah blah blah. . . . . .

Search out the facts and THEN form an opinion!

. . . . mumble mumble. . . . .

[Idacat]

Well said, PD, with the one exception that Michael did not attend nursing school until AFTER Terri's cardiac incident; the expressed intent being so that he could care for her, which he did do, but not for long.

I'm aware that Karen Carpenter's heart attack, which was a heart attack, was quite different than Terri Schiavo's cardiac incident which was sudden cardiac death caused by electrolyte imbalance. FWIW, that electrolyte imbalance/low potassium would not have had to have been of particularly long duration; I once saw this happen in a 2 year old whose "earth muffin" mother wanted to cleanse his body of parasites and toxins using enemas from her health store. They took the potassium along with the "toxins" and the child was dead in hours.

PS- I do think there was adequate third party testimony that Terri was obsessive about not regaining lost weight and doing some mightly bizarre things to avoid it, including purging.

[StrawberryFields]

Originally posted by bizabra+Mar 30 2005, 08:58 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (bizabra @ Mar 30 2005, 08:58 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--Strawberry Fields@Mar 29 2005, 07:47 AM

Thank you Begood2 you were able to state the facts clearly and calmly. I feel very close to what is happening with Terri because of the trauma that I have experienced these last several months with my own son Nick. I feel for Terri's parents who have always had her best interest at heart but have been stripped of all legal rights. The only right which they still have is that of being able to speak out and to be heard.

Thank you for also reading the links that I included where many might just consider me to be a raging lunatic driven by passion.

I see that Snow has also attacked you for seeking out more then the media is willing to produce, and for that I feel bad.

Or they are granted a divorce.

I think you are to close to this issue to see it objectively, dontcha think?

And who or what is "this media"? How can the Schindler families web page with it's passionate distortions and sympathetic links be considered an unbiased source?

Willikers!

Biz,

I think that you probably understand that the main stream media is "selective" in what they report. Media is driven or supported by advertisers and politically motivated.

I may be close to this issue but I feel I might be just a little more educated, then some, (from my own experience)of what proper rehab can do for a severely brain injured person. I have watched Nick make very significant strides as professionals have worked with him in therapy, which is something Michael failed to provide even thought the courts provided the funds for him to do so to the tune of 750,000. Where has the money gone? The money has gone to Michael so that he might have a better chance a finding a ¡Ègood attorney¡É to see that she dies.

[StrawberryFields]

Originally posted by bizabra+Mar 30 2005, 09:02 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (bizabra @ Mar 30 2005, 09:02 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'>

Originally posted by -Strawberry Fields@Mar 29 2005, 09:39 AM

<!--QuoteBegin--Outshined@Mar 29 2005, 10:19 AM

The funny thing is, her husband insists on the autopsy...

Maybe and maybe not... Could it be the Florida Law states that before any cremation can take place that an autopsy is required first? I am researching that now, so if anyone else is quicker then I am let us know okay? If this is true then Felos is raising another smoke screen that his client is the one being the good guy in the final hour. It may also be that enough questions are being raised about Michael¡Çs motives that Congress is insisting on the autopsy. The worst part is that an autopsy can only happen AFTER Terri has been killed.

If Terri receives an autopsy from a reliable coronor, who has not been bought off, I wonder if Michael will be available for questioning.

Sheesh!

Maybe, might, could be, blah blah blah. . . . . .

Search out the facts and THEN form an opinion!

. . . . mumble mumble. . . . .

Or I can consider the source and overlook your comment.

[Idacat]

Originally posted by bizabra@Mar 30 2005, 08:58 PM

Strawberry Fields,Mar 29 2005, 07:47 AM]

I think you are to close to this issue to see it objectively, dontcha think?

We all are.

My parents both entrusted me with their wishes not to be kept among the living dead and, although it was hard, I did keep my word. I have seen cases in which this was not done and think they are sadder than any death could ever be.

OTOH, I have a son who sustained massive cranial and facial injuries in an accident in his early twenties. He was comatose or semi comatose, off and on a ventilator, for months. He lost an eye and the right half of his face had to be entirely reconstructed. To this day he has no sinus drainage and, because the floor of the right orbit could not be reconstructed, a prosthesis is not feasible. Even after his months in the hospital for the initial hospitalization he had an open trach and was fed via an oro-gastric tube because his maxilla was fractured in several places. He is alive today with little or no cognitive impairment, and is lucky enough to have retained sight in his remaining eye.

But, at the time of the accident, just several years after my parents, we had discussed being kept "alive" only via artificial means, and it was his wish also that this never happen to him. So, if logical hope had passed, I would have gracefully let him go,, unlike Terri's parents.

[Idacat]

Originally posted by Strawberry Fields@Mar 30 2005, 09:28 PM

Or I can consider the source and overlook your comment.

Or, you could try using some reliable sources, logic and not emotion, remember that Terri's brain injury is complete as to the cerebral cortex,as I suspect your son's is not, and use that "knowledge" of yours to screen your sources a little better.

In fact, in the first 2-3 years following Terri's incident, her husband actually did pursue every possible avenue, including the experimental, in terms of treatment and therapy.

Terri has a right to die, although her chances at dignity are long gone due to the actions of her parents.

[Idacat]

Here's another good link for those who are having trouble dicriminating which part of the brain does what and how Terri can be PVS yet breathing on her own.

Brain functions and map, interactive even

[StrawberryFields]

Originally posted by Idacat+Mar 30 2005, 10:07 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Idacat @ Mar 30 2005, 10:07 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--Strawberry Fields@Mar 30 2005, 09:28 PM

Or I can consider the source and overlook your comment.

Or, you could try using some reliable sources, logic and not emotion, remember that Terri's brain injury is complete as to the cerebral cortex,as I suspect your son's is not, and use that "knowledge" of yours to screen your sources a little better.

In fact, in the first 2-3 years following Terri's incident, her husband actually did pursue every possible avenue, including the experimental, in terms of treatment and therapy.

Terri has a right to die, although her chances at dignity are long gone due to the actions of her parents.

Not only are insensitive but insulting and I have no use for you.

[Jenda]

Originally posted by Idacat+Mar 30 2005, 06:54 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Idacat @ Mar 30 2005, 06:54 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--Jenda@Mar 30 2005, 07:39 PM

Again, I am asking you where you get your information.  I worked for many years as a RN on a unit that cared for patients with PVS's resulting from lack of oxygen, and they had to be ventilator-assisted.

Then, their brain stems were affected with or without damage to the cortex.

If you are a nurse you understand the functions of the different lobes of the brain, brain stem intact, breathing can be unassisted (except in the case of assisted breathing due to pneumonia, such as Jerry Falwell is now receiving). It is Terri's cerebral cortex that is gone, her brain stem is intact. You don't need your cerebral cortex to breathe; you need it to be.

Ask a few doctors, I did.

And, if anything, keeping people alive like this who require assisted breathing is even more of an abomination of compassion, and an argument for having a living will, health care proxy, and/or advance directive than is even Terri's situation.

My question was asked because your information conflicts with reality. Unless there was different damage than what was stated, lack of oxygen, as experienced by many that I cared for, caused much more severe problems than Terri sustained, also stated to come from a lack of oxygen.

Experience tells me that there is a different scenario being played out in Terri's case than just "lack of oxygen". Unless there was not as much damage done to her as to the ones that I cared for that were PVS, as evidenced by the requirement of being ventilator-assisted. And if her damage was not as bad, she could not be in a PVS. (Brain dead is such a vague, unmedical term that I refuse to use it.)

[Idacat]

Jenda.........please check the link I posted above with the brain map.

The important factor here is NOT the cause of the brain injury, the brain having been deprived of oxygen. It is the specific area of the brain that was deprived of oxygen and therefore damaged. It isn't the "as much" dmage as it is where the dmage is located.

People with an intact brain stem can breathe on their own, but if their cerebral cortex is gone (literally) they are without cognition, feeling, emotion, and volitional movement.

And, ventilator assisted breathing is not in any definiton I have been able to find for PVS, so perhaps the definition is in conflict with reality?

At any rate, the brain map site should clear up the confusion, I hope.

[Idacat]

Originally posted by Strawberry Fields@Mar 30 2005, 10:15 PM

Not only are insensitive but insulting and I have no use for you.

Do you actually WANT to understand any of this or is what you find in those libelous, gossipy, unscientific, biased sites all you care to know??

If so, then, whatever.

I can show you a site that claims HIV does not cause AIDS too.

[Idacat]

Originally posted by Jenda@Mar 30 2005, 10:20 PM

. My question was asked because your information conflicts with reality.

OK, here is a link to a huge PDF file defining PVS:

PVS as per American Academy of Neurology

Since it is PDF I can't copy or paste, but here are a couple of exerpts (verbatim, emphasis mine)

Definition:

Sufficiently preserved hypothalamic and brainstem autonomic function to permit survival with medical and nursing care.

Categories and Clinical Course of PVS:

A. Acute traumatic and nontraumatic brain injury:PVS usually evolves within 1 month of injury from a state of eyes-closed coma to a state of wakefulness without awareness with sleep-wake cycles and preserved brainstem functions.

Both of these statements indicate that brainstem function is intact in PVS; breathing is mediated by the brainstem.

A couple of interesting paraphrases:

.....after 12 months almost no probability of recovery....

......lifespan is substantially reduced, 2-5 years......

this last seems to indicate that Terri has long since outlived her predicted lifespan as a person in PVS

[Guest bizabra]

Yes, the fact that she has lived for 15 years could be considered a testament to the care that Mr. Schiavo made sure that she was provided with. And she must have been well nutritioned and hydrated prior to removing the tube, as evidenced by the fact that she did not slip away within a few days.

BTW, SF, I consider all forms of publication to be "media", I read or listen to most everything I stumble across via the radio, internet, tv magazines, etc. I am omnivorous in my information ingestion. So, it's ALL "the media" to me. Even the biased sites you linked. ;-) Thanks for sharing.

Ms. Fields, it's kinda funny to read your accusations to Snow about forming an opinion and THEN finding the facts that back it up. Thanks for the giggle! Keep it up! Let us know when you figure out who the second shooter was that fired from the Grassy Knoll, too, 'K?

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Ida,

I once saw this happen in a 2 year old whose "earth muffin" mother wanted to cleanse his body of parasites and toxins using enemas from her health store. They took the potassium along with the "toxins" and the child was dead in hours.

Gads. That's horrible.

[StrawberryFields]

This is not a game, and it this not a ride, this is a life that we are discussing. Terri will soon be gone, but her legacy, with her supporters will live on.

Science does have its place, but not in life or death matters, that belongs to the Will of Our Heavenly Father. If science was correct, Nick would not be here today.

Personal insults to me will never change the way I feel about this, and it only shows me that you have run out of options. Furthermore, it is your lack of empathy that shows others who you truly are.

[StrawberryFields]

She is gone.

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.htm...y=1112281512000

[Guest JRodan]

Originally posted by Strawberry Fields@Mar 31 2005, 10:16 AM

She is gone.

Thank you Jesus!!

[Guest curvette]

Originally posted by Strawberry Fields@Mar 31 2005, 09:16 AM

She is gone.

http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/swissinfo.htm...y=1112281512000

Yeah, and the jerk wouldn't even let her parents spend her dying moments with her.

[StrawberryFields]

NEWS STORY

Remembering a woman with a 'real life'

Jerry Schwartz

Canadian Press

Thursday, March 31, 2005

She was not always Terri Schiavo: national obsession.

Debbie Meyer remembers when she was Terri Schindler, a chubby child with big brown eyes behind Coke-bottle glasses, a guest at Meyer's third birthday party at the Philadelphia Zoo.

As the birthday girl, Debbie was given a key to storybooks posted around the zoo. Turn the key, and a recorded voice would talk about the animals. Other children at the party wanted a key, too, and were jealous.

But not Terri. "She was just so excited," so happy to be there, so thrilled to be among the animals she loved more than anything in the world," Meyer said.

This is the Terri she remembers -- not the heartbreaking figure whose every facial tic was scrutinized for evidence of a conscious mind within. Not the central figure of a maelstrom, silent as multitudes debated her life and death.

For those multitudes who never knew her, it was easy to forget that this was a real woman who led a real life. But for her friends and family, it was impossible to forget.

Meyer, for instance, remembers the time more than 20 years ago when an excited Terri called her at college. She had a date -- the first date this once overweight girl had ever had. Please, Terri begged, you have to come home and help me get ready.

Meyer couldn't make it home in time, but she was there the next day, to rehash Terri's spectacular night of romance. The boy was tall and handsome and he had kissed her.

The boy was Michael Schiavo; she had met him at a sociology class at Bucks County Community College, and they married a little more than a year later.

He would be her only lover.

She did not go to her senior prom. She had had crushes, of course, unrequited -- a boy named Vincent in seventh grade, for one. She adored Danielle Steel romances, pored over Tiger Beat magazine with her friends, debated who was cutest -- the TV cops Starsky or Hutch. She liked Starsky, and with her friend Sue Pickwell wrote scores of letters to actor Paul Michael Glaser.

Once, she and Meyer went to see the film An Officer and a Gentleman four times in one day.

She was a shy person. Her high school yearbook, from Archbishop Wood in suburban Philadelphia, lists only one activity -- library aide. Rev. Chris Walsh, the school minister, said that while several teachers remain from those days, only one remembers Terri, and not much about her.

Benjamin Shatz lived next to the Schindlers' four-bedroom colonial on Red Wing Lane in the Albidale section of Huntingdon Valley. All he remembers is "a nice child, respectful, polite."

Her shyness may have had something to do with her weight. Just 5-foot-3, she weighed 200 pounds in high school. "She cried a lot when she went to get clothes," said her mother, Mary.

But Meyer remembers laughter, instead. "Among those who knew her, she was always vivacious. She had a laugh that made everyone laugh," she said.

She collected Precious Moments figurines, as well as stuffed animals -- she had more than 100 of them -- and spent hours in her purple-and-white bedroom arranging them. Real animals were her passion; she rode horses and wanted to be a veterinarian, but she was an unenthusiastic student and never graduated college.

One night, she came home crying, sure that she had run over a rabbit or squirrel. Her family calmed her down and convinced her no animal had died, but then her brother Bobby retrieved the dead bunny and threw it in the bushes, so she'd never know.

Another time, the family's Labrador retriever Bucky collapsed, and Terri tried to give him mouth-to-muzzle resuscitation. He died as she held him.

The Schindlers -- Mary and Robert (owner of an industrial equipment company) and their children Theresa Marie, Bobby and Suzanne -- were a tight-knit family. Terri joined her mother for mass on Saturdays, and all would gather around the table for roast beef on Sunday.

She was especially close to her mother. "When people say I was her best friend, I say no," said Meyer. "I was her closest friend. Her mother was her best friend."

After she and Michael were married -- on Nov. 10, 1984, at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church -- the couple lived in the Schindlers' basement.

In 1986, they moved into a condominium her parents owned in Florida, paying $400-a-month rent; the rest of the Schindlers also moved to the Sunshine State.

By this time, the 200-pound Terri was no more. Dieting, she had lost more than 50 pounds by the time she started college. She dyed her hair blonde, wore a bikini and liked to tan.

"Terri has always been beautiful from the inside out," Meyer said. "And then when she lost all the weight, she really became quite beautiful on the outside as well. What was inside she allowed to shine out at that point."

In Florida, Michael was hired as a restaurant manager, and Terri was an office worker for Prudential insurance. "Everybody liked her. She was hard-working," said Jackie Rhodes, a co-worker and pal.

Was she happy? Rhodes said Terri wanted to have children and had stopped using birth control, but had not become pregnant. She had seen a doctor about it.

Her friends and family say she was unhappy with Michael. He was controlling, they say, and tried to keep her away from them; he was abusive, they say, and told her that if she ever got fat again, he would leave her.

By this time, she weighed under 120 pounds, and her ribs were visible.

Her family doubts that she had an eating disorder; her doctors are not sure whether anorexia or something like it was the root of the potassium imbalance they say probably caused her heart to stop on Feb. 25, 1990, when she collapsed in the hallway outside her bedroom.

She was 26. She died 15 years later, a symbol to millions around the world, a person to those who knew and mourned her.

¡¦The Associated Press 2005

[Marsha]

May she rest in peace now. My heart goes out to the entire family and loved ones.

[DisRuptive1]

That does seem rude that he wouldn't let them stay with her when she died.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=...ssue=2005-04-02

[StrawberryFields]

Originally posted by TheProudDuck@Mar 31 2005, 03:08 PM

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=...ssue=2005-04-02

PD Will you post the article the link doesn't work unless you are a subscriber.

[Guest TheProudDuck]

Originally posted by Strawberry Fields+Mar 31 2005, 02:21 PM--></span><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td>QUOTE (Strawberry Fields @ Mar 31 2005, 02:21 PM)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'> <!--QuoteBegin--TheProudDuck@Mar 31 2005, 03:08 PM

http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=...ssue=2005-04-02

PD Will you post the article the link doesn't work unless you are a subscriber.

Public execution

Mark Steyn

New Hampshire

Do you remember a fellow called Robert Wendland? No reason why you should. I wrote about him in this space in 1998, and had intended to return to the subject but something else always intervened — usually Bill Clinton’s penis, which loomed large, at least metaphorically, over the entire era. Mr Wendland lived in Stockton, California. He was injured in an automobile accident in 1993 and went into a coma. Under state law, he could have been starved to death at any time had his wife requested the removal of his feeding tube. But Rose Wendland was busy with this and that, as one is, and assumed there was no particular urgency.

Then one day, a year later, Robert woke up. He wasn’t exactly his old self, but he could catch and throw a ball and wheel his chair up and down the hospital corridors, and both activities gave him pleasure. Nevertheless Mrs Wendland decided that she now wished to exercise her right to have him dehydrated to death. Her justification was that, while the actual living Robert — the Robert of the mid-1990s — might enjoy a simple life of ball-catching and chair-rolling, the old Robert — the pre-1993 Robert — would have considered it a crashing bore and would have wanted no part of it.

She nearly got her way. But someone at the hospital tipped off Mr Wendland’s mother and set off a protracted legal struggle in which — despite all the obstacles the California system could throw in her path — the elderly Florence Wendland was eventually successful in preventing her son being put down. He has since died of pneumonia, which is sad: the disabled often fall victim to some opportunist illness they’d have shrugged off in earlier times, as Christopher Reeve did. But that’s still a better fate than to be starved to death by order of the state.

Six and a half years later, the Terri Schiavo case is almost identical to Robert Wendland’s — parents who wish to care for a disabled daughter, a spouse who wants her dead, a legal system determined to see her off. The only difference is that this time the system is likely to win — it may already have done so by the time you read this — and that Mrs Schiavo’s death is being played out round the clock coast to coast, with full supporting cast. It is easy to mock the attendant ‘circus’, the cheapest laugh of the self-identified sophisticate. A 12-year-old boy has been arrested for attempting to offer Mrs Schiavo a glass of water. Ha-ha.

On the other hand, if one accepts the official version that the court is merely bringing to an end (after 15 years) the artificial prolongation of Mrs Schiavo’s life, since when has a glass of water been deemed medical treatment? In the public areas of Morton Plant Hospital in Clearwater, the waiting journalists grab a Coke or a coffee or even a glass of water every half hour or so without anyone considering it ‘medical treatment’. That it is, uniquely, a crime to serve Mrs Schiavo a beverage underlines the court’s intent — not to cease the artificial prolongation of life but actively to cause her death.

When poor Terri Schiavo broke on to the front pages, several commentators said the case was another Elian Gonzalez — the Cuban boy whose mother died trying to bring him to freedom in America. That’s to say, it was one of those stories where all sorts of turbulent questions of law, morality and politics collide. Two weeks on, if it’s Clintonian analogies we’re after, it seems to me the public regard it as something closer to the whole Paula/Monica/Juanita production line culminating in impeachment: if you recall, a large number of people were outraged by the President, a smaller number of people were determined to defend him to the end, and a huge number of people just didn’t want to hear about it; and the more Republicans went on about the DNA analysis of the dress stain and Mr Clinton lying about whether his enumerated parts had been in contact with her enumerated parts and the DNA analysis of the dress stain, the more they stuck their hands over their ears and said, ‘La-la-la, can’t hear you.’

That seems to be what’s happening here. Whether or not there’s anything in the various dubious polls claiming to show people opposed to Congressional efforts to reinsert Mrs Schiavo’s feeding tube, it seems clear that many of us would rather she’d been like Robert Wendland — a faraway local story of which they know little. A lot of Americans have paced hospital corridors while gran’ma’s medical taxi-meter goes ticking upward and, if my mailbag’s anything to go by, they’d rather this sort of stuff stayed in the shadows. Nobody likes to see how the sausage is made, or in this case the vegetable, if that indeed is what Terri Schiavo is. Many people seem to be unusually anxious to pretend that this judicial murder is merely a very belated equivalent of a discreet doctor putting a hopeless case out of her misery, or to take refuge in the idea that some magisterial disinterested ‘due process’ is being played out — or as a reader wrote to me the other day: ‘Why are you fundamentalists so clueless? It’s the law, dickbrain. Michael Schiavo isn’t acting for himself; he’s been legally recognised as the person qualified to act for Terri in expressing her wishes based on her own oral declarations.’

Which sounds fine and dandy, until you uncover your ears and a lot of the genteel euphemisms and legalisms and medicalisms — ‘right to die’, ‘guardian ad litem’, ‘PVS’ — start to sound downright Orwellian. PVS means ‘persistent vegetative state’, and because it’s a grand official-sounding term it’s been accepted mostly without question by the mainstream media, even though the probate judge declared Mrs Schiavo in a persistent vegetative state without troubling to visit her and without requiring any of the routine tests, such as an MRI scan. Indeed, her husband hasn’t permitted her to be tested for anything since 1993. Think about that: this woman is being put to death without any serious medical evaluation more recent than 12 years ago.

La-la-la, we don’t want to hear how the vegetable’s made....

Fortunately, if you want to execute someone who hasn’t committed a crime, you don’t need to worry with any of this ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’ stuff. If an al-Qa’eda guy got shot up resisting capture in Afghanistan and required a feeding tube and the guards at Guantanamo yanked it out, you’d never hear the end of it from the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International and all the rest. Even given the litigious nature of American society, it still strikes me as remarkable that someone can be literally sued to death, and at the hands of a probate judge. Unlike other condemned prisoners, there’s no hope of a last-minute reprieve from the governor. That’s to say, he did reprieve her, and so did the legislature, and the US Congress and President — and the Florida courts have declared them all irrelevant. So, unlike Death Row, there’s no call from the governor, and no quick painless lethal injection or electrocution or swift clean broken neck from the hangman’s noose, and certainly no last meal. On Tuesday, getting a little impatient with the longest slow-motion public execution in American history, CBS News accidentally posted Mrs Schiavo’s obit on their website complete with vivid details that have yet to occur — the parents at her bedside in the final moments, etc. In this, they seem to be in tune with their viewers: sad business, personal tragedy, no easy answers, prayers are with her family, yada yada, is it over yet?

Just to underline the Clinton comparison, the Sunday Times’s Andrew Sullivan has dusted off his impeachment act and damned those of us opposed to Mrs Schiavo’s judicial murder as dogmatic extremist fundamentalist religious-right theocrats. If he’d stop his shrill bleating for a couple of minutes, he might notice that the ‘theocrats’ who want Terri Schiavo to live include Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank, who’s not just a Democrat but a gay one.

True, the TV networks — as they often do with what they see as socially conservative issues — prefer to train their cameras on some of Mrs Schiavo’s more obviously loopy defenders. But, for all that, it seems far weirder to me to be quite so enthusiastic about ending her life. I’ve received innumerable emails along the lines of, ‘If Terri Schiavo didn’t want this to happen to her, all she had to do under Florida law was make a “living will”’ — one of those documents that says in the event of a severe disability I do/do not want to be kept alive (delete as applicable). Well, OK, I haven’t received ‘innumerable’ emails, but I’ve received enough that I now send back a form response politely inquiring whether the correspondent has himself made a living will. I’ve yet to receive any answers. But I can’t see why, in a free society, healthy persons in their twenties should be expected to file legal documents in order to pre-empt a court order mandating their death a decade or two hence.

Even if you believe in living wills, it’s hard to argue that Michael Schiavo’s wildly inconsistent statements of his wife’s casual remarks about living on a tube should have the force of one. I’d be irked to find I was being deported to Pyongyang on the grounds that, while watching a TV documentary late one night in 1987, I’d been heard to say, ‘Wow, you know it’d be kinda cool to go to North Korea, don’t you think?’ But the Florida legal system’s position remains — as a reader, Adrienne Follmer, paraphrased it to me the other day — ‘We don’t know for sure if this woman wanted to live so let’s starve her to death.’

La-la-la, still can’t hear you....

One consequence of abortion is that, in designating new life as a matter of ‘choice’, it created a culture where it’s now routine to make judgments about which lives are worth it and which aren’t. Down’s Syndrome? Abort. Cleft palate? Abort. Chinese girl? Abort. It’s foolish to think you can raise entire populations — not to mention generations of doctors — to make self-interested judgments about who lives and who doesn’t and expect them to remain confined to three trimesters. The ‘right to choose’ is now being extended beyond the womb: the step from convenience euthanasia to compulsory euthanasia is a short one. Until a year or two back, I spent a lot of my summer Saturdays manning the historical society booth at the flea markets on the town common, and I passed many a pleasant quarter-hour or so chit-chatting with elderly ladies leading some now middle-aged simpleton child around. Both parties seemed to enjoy the occasion. The child is no doubt a ‘burden’: he was born because he just was; there was no ‘choice’ about it in those days. Having done away with those kinds of ‘burdens’ at birth, we’re less inclined to tolerate them when they strike in adulthood, as they did in Terri Schiavo’s case.

In that sense, the Schiavo debate provides a glimpse of the Western world the day after tomorrow — a world of nonagenarian baby boomers who’ve conquered most of the common-or-garden diseases and instead get stricken by freaky protracted colossally expensive chronic illnesses; a world of more and more dependants, with fewer and fewer people to depend on. In Europe, where demographic reality means that in a generation or so all the dependants will be elderly European Christians and most of the fellows they’re dependent on will be young North African or Arab Muslims, the social consensus for government health care is unlikely to survive. Terri Schiavo failed to demonstrate conclusively why she should be permitted by the state to continue living. As Western nations evolve rapidly into the oldest societies in human history, many more of us will be found similarly wanting.

Michael Schiavo’s lawyer, George Felos, is a leading light of the so-called ‘right-to-die’ movement, and his book, Litigation as Spiritual Practice, makes interesting reading. On page 240 Mr Felos writes, ‘The Jewish people, long ago in their collective consciousness, agreed to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter was necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. Their sacrifice saved humanity at the brink of extinction and propelled us into a new age.... If our minds can conceive of an uplifting Holocaust, can it be so difficult to look another way at the slights and injuries and abuses we perceive were inflicted upon us?’

Mr Felos feels it is now Terri Schiavo’s turn to ‘agree’ to play the role of the lamb whose slaughter is necessary to shock humanity into a new moral consciousness. As I read Felos’s words, I heard a radio bulletin announce that the Pope may now require a feeding tube. Fortunately for him, his life is ultimately in the hands of God and not a Florida probate judge.

[Outshined]

Let's hope her soul can rest in peace now, though her name will doubtless continue to be a political football.