More on Terri Schiavo

[StPaulieGirl]

Sorry folks...it's all freerepublic all the time...

http://ap.tbo.com/ap/florida/MGACEZ8LAND.html

CLEARWATER, Fla. (AP) - Gov. Jeb Bush asked an appeals court Friday to disqualify a judge in the constitutional battle over a law that allowed doctors to reinsert a brain-damaged woman's feeding tube.
The appeal came a day after Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge W. Douglas Baird refused to step aside as requested by Bush.

The governor wants Baird off the case after he said at a hearing last week that the hastily passed law intruded on Terri Schiavo's privacy rights and was "presumptively unconstitutional." Schiavo's husband Michael has offered those arguments and is suing Bush to challenge the law.

Baird "cannot continue to preside over this matter without being swayed by his own personal biases and prejudices in this case," Bush said in an affidavit filed with the appeal.

State courts have repeatedly affirmed Michael Schiavo's right as his wife's legal guardian to have the tube removed. Terri Schiavo went without water and nutrition for six days before the Legislature and Bush stepped in Oct. 21 to have the tube reinserted.

Baird said he didn't contest the facts in Bush's motion to disqualify him, but it didn't reach the legal threshold required to recuse himself.

Meanwhile, another judge also refused Friday to disqualify himself in a separate battle over Terri Schiavo's guardianship.

Circuit Judge George Greer denied the request by Terri Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, who are trying to get Michael Schiavo removed as their daughter's guardian.

Greer has presided over the case the longest, and the Schindlers have tried three previous times to get him off the case. They charge he favors their son-in-law.

Michael Schiavo has been battling his in-laws in court for years to remove his wife's feeding tube, saying she would not to be kept alive artificially. She suffered severe brain damage after collapsing in 1990.

Doctors and Greer have ruled she has been in a persistent vegetative state since then, but her parents believe she is aware of her surroundings and could be rehabilitated.

AP-ES-11-21-03 1348EST

[Indigo Mom]

I feel for her parents.  My goodness...can you imagine?????????????


Common sense says that when a person is brought to the hospital completely screwed up, TESTS MUST BE DONE.

When a spouse is dead set on having their partner KILLED, continues to attempt to get her death going, SOMETHING IS WRONG.

I talked to my hub about this.  I described this situation without giving details that it's a "real" case.  I asked him if he'd put me to death.  He said that if everything medically possible was done, and I was in a state where I was a vegetable, then yes, he'd want to help me die.

Note....." if everything medically possible was done"

This "man" has done NOTHING but try to kill this woman...I wonder...is he pissed that she didn't die from the horrible beating she so clearly received???????

Common sense also says that this guy will NOT remove himself as guardian because to do so would leave the door wide open for him to become "bubbas bitch" in prison forever.

[lah101]

And just why does he want to let her die?  Hmmm?  Maybe  it is the fact there is money involved?  So why whould he  give up guardianship?  This man is sick.  From what i have seen, she is interacting with her parents and is not braindead---so how can they justify just killing her?


Do unto other as you would have them do unto you-----but do it to them FIRST!

[KAT]

My thoughts are that he just doesn't want to divorce her. She'd be appointed an attorney to look out for her interests in the martial assets including  ALIMONY!!!!

Heck, he's already gone on with his life. Why doesn't he just let her keep going on with hers? Her parents are willing to care for her, they gave her life he shouldn't have a choice in her death.

KAT

[nosonew]

As a registered nurse, I have seen many patients lie in suffering waiting for the end.  Many have made their wishes clear on paper, DO NOTHING to prolong my life, however, if the wife/husband doesn't agree with what the patient wrote, they may over-ride the decision.  Thus, the patient ends up on a ventilator, tube feedings, gets bed-sores, muscles waste away, the pain is excrutiating, all so the person "left" feels better.  

In this particular case, the woman was so severely brain damaged in a car accident that she is in a vegetative state and has been for over ten years.  Is it likely she and her husband discussed what they would like done if this happened?  We likely will never know.  However, if my spouse was in a vegetative state, kept alive thru tube feedings, unable to communicate for over 10 years, I would let him die peacefully.  Remove the tubes!  

I realize the parents are under the misconception that if a person opens their eyes or muscles twitch that they can "eventually" come back.  However, eyes opening and muscle twitching are common events with vegetative states, some even smile, grunt, etc.  Thus, giving those living real lives a sense of hope.

So, what this really means is: Quality of life or Quantity of life.  I prefer quality over quantity myself, and everyone important to me knows it.
JMHO.

[Indigo Mom]

You must read all the doctors reports, the bone scan report, read it all and you'll see that this bastard deserves nothing more than life wihtout parole.

Had he NOT played this "protect me" game 13 years ago, she would have a better quality of life.  He chose to force her into a slow death.

I'm not sure about this car accident thing.  What I read on the website, hub suddenly woke up at 6am and his wife was a zombie.  I heard nothing about a car accident.  If it was simple as that, then yes.

But the facts surrounding the case show this man is evil.  

He's NOT trying to spare her pain, he's killing her.  Can you give me one good reason why he refuses to divorce her though he's got a girlfriend, a child by her, and apparently another one on the way?

money money money...and protection for his actions.

[StPaulieGirl]

It's Not Only About Terri Schiavo
The Village Voice ^ | November 21, 2003 | Nat Hentoff


Posted on 11/22/2003 11:44 AM PST by sweetliberty


People already have the right to refuse unwanted treatment, and suicide is not illegal. What we oppose is a public policy that singles out individuals for legalized killing based on their health status. This violates the Americans With Disabilities Act, and denies us equal protection of the laws.


Disability opposition to this ultimate form of discrimination has been ignored by most media and courts, but countless people with disabilities have already died before their time. —Not Dead Yet: The Resistance, a disability rights organization, Forest Park, Illinois, October 28, 2003



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


In 1920, a prominent German lawyer, Karl Binding, and a distinguished German forensic psychiatrist, Alfred Hoche, wrote a brief but deadly book, The Permission To Destroy Life Unworthy of Life. In his new book, The Coming of the Third Reich (Penguin), Richard Evans notes that Binding and Hoche emphasized that "the incurably ill and the mentally retarded were costing millions of marks and taking up thousands of much-needed hospital beds. So doctors should be allowed to put them to death."


Then came Adolf Hitler, who thought this was a splendid, indeed capital, idea. The October 1, 2003, New York Daily News ran this Associated Press report from Berlin:


"A new study reveals Nazi Germany killed at least 200,000 people because of their disabilities—people deemed physically inferior, said a report compiled by Germany's Federal Archive. Researchers found evidence that doctors and hospital staff used gas, drugs and starvation to kill disabled men, women and children at medical facilities in Germany, Austria, Poland and the Czech Republic. . . .


"The Nazis launched the drive to root out what they called 'worthless lives' [and 'useless eaters'] in the summer of 1939, pre-dating their full-scale organization of the Holocaust, in which they killed 6 million Jews." (Emphasis added).


The more than 200,000 "worthless lives" terminated by the Nazis before the Holocaust included few Jews. Most of those killed were other Germans considered unfit to be included in "the master race."


Among the defendants at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders and their primary accomplices in the mass murder were German doctors who had gone along with the official policy of euthanasia. An American doctor, Leo Alexander, who spoke German, had interviewed the German physician-defendants before the trials, and then served as an expert on the American staff at Nuremberg.


In an article in the July 14, 1949, New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Alexander warned that the Nazis' crimes against humanity had "started from small beginnings . . . merely a subtle shift in emphasis in the basic attitude of the physicians. It started with the acceptance, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived." That shift in emphasis among physicians, said Dr. Alexander, could happen here, in America.


Actually, the devaluing of apparent "imperfect life" had begun years before, in the United States. Various academics, in and out of the medical profession, had successfully advocated and instituted a eugenics movement—the perfecting of future generations of Americans by deciding who, depending on their hereditary genes, would be allowed to have children. The unfit would no longer be permitted to reproduce.


These American eugenicists provided German proponents of a "master race" with inspiration. As Robert Jay Lifton wrote in his invaluable book The Nazi Doctors (Basic Books), "A rising interest in eugenics [in America had] led, by 1920, to the enactment of laws in twenty-five states providing for compulsory sterilization of the criminally insane and other people considered genetically inferior." (Emphasis added).


Paying attention in Germany, Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's executioners, said the Nazis were "like the plant-breeding specialist who, when he wants to breed a pure new strain . . . goes over the field to cull the unwanted plants." Under the Nazis, there were eugenics courts to decide who could have children. In the United States Supreme Court (Buck v. Bell, 1927), Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, ruling that 18-year-old Carrie Buck should be involuntarily sterilized, famously wrote:


"If instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing of their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Only Justice Pierce Butler dissented.


In this country, the eugenics movement lost its cachet for a time because the Nazis had gone from sterilization of the disabled to herding the religiously, racially, and politically unfit into gas chambers.


But there has been an American revival of eugenics in certain elite circles. A few years ago, an archconservative who had talked with some of the present-day, would-be purifiers of the American stock told me they were delighted at the deaths from AIDS of homosexuals.


But to protect the disabled from "mercy" killings, as well as eugenicists, another movement was forming here. Not long before he died, Dr. Alexander read an article in the April 12, 1984, New England Journal of Medicine by 10 physicians—part of the growing "death with dignity" brigade. They were from such prestigious medical schools as Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Virginia. These distinguished healers wrote that when a patient was in a "persistent vegetative state," it was "morally justifiable" to "withhold antibiotics and artificial nutrition (feeding tubes) and hydration, as well as other forms of life-sustaining treatment, allowing the patient to die." They ignored the finding that not all persistent vegetative states are permanent.


After reading the article, Dr. Alexander said to a friend: "It is much like Germany in the '20s and '30s. The barriers against killing are coming down."


Next week: The growing conviction among American doctors, bioethicists, and hospital ethics committees that it is "futile" to try to treat certain patients, and therefore, medical professionals should have the power to decide—even against the wishes of the family—when to allow these valueless lives to end.


If the courts finally permit the husband of brain-damaged Terri Schiavo to continue to press for her death by starvation—by again removing her feeding tube—more of the barriers to killing may come down in other states. So this isn't only about Terri Schiavo. It could be about you.

[VeronicaGia]

IMHO, once a person is married, their spouse becomes their family, parents come second.  Her parents lost their rights once Terry got married.  Now, if he wanted to do this immediately after she went into a coma, I could understand.  But the fact is her parents refuse to let go.

And the courts?  Forget them.  We've all seen how well they do in other family issues....NOT!

[StPaulieGirl]

When a man and woman marry, the parents do come second(well, in a perfect world).  That's the way it should be.  

Now, if we see our adult son or daughter being mistreated, wouldn't we try and intervene?  Terri's folks trusted her husband to do the right thing  for several years.  After Terri's husband received the settlement, all of a sudden he remembered that she didn't want to be on life support.  He ordered that no therapy of any kind be given to her.  That settlement was a trust fund for Terri's medical needs.  Terri ISN'T on life support; she breathes and functions on her own.  She can probably swallow food and liquid, but medical personnel have been forbidden to try.  Let's give her a chance.  Let's put her in a wheel chair so she can get some sunshine, fresh air, and stimuli....

At least Terri has parents who care.  

[StPaulieGirl]

http://www.american-partisan.com/cols/2003/king/qtr4/1119.htm

Suspicious Circumstances -
The Strange Case of Terri Schiavo
by Jennifer King, Managing Editor

November 19, 2003



As the case of Terri Schiavo (right) slips away from the front pages, it is worth revisiting the odd twists and tangles of this bizarre case. There are mysterious connections and odd characters which, so far, have failed to elicit the curiosity of the mainstream media. To recap the case, Terri Schiavo collapsed at home in 1990 under suspicious circumstances. Her lapse into a vigorously debated "vegetative" state is usually blamed on a potassium deficiency, but hospital admittance records also show evidence of trauma to her neck.

Further questions arise from testimony of one of her friends, who allege that Terri was unhappy and contemplating a divorce from her husband Michael. Michael is alleged to have been possessive and jealous, at one point falling into a rage when Terri spent $80 on a haircut.

After the accident, Michael became Terri's guardian, and he used that position to seek a hefty malpractice award. A sympathetic jury took the seemingly distraught Michael at his word, awarding him $1.2 million, earmarked for Terri's rehabilitation, with an additional $300,000 going directly to him for "loss of consortium". After receiving the award, however, Michael seemingly lost all interest in Terri's rehabilitation. Several nurses who worked with Terri in the early 1990's filed affidavits which detail some very troubling events. Nurse Carolyn Johnson alleges that Michael Schiavo was adamant about not providing any rehabilitation at all for Terri - including common therapies such as placing a towel in her hands to keep them from seizing up. Nurse Heidi Law testified that she would feed Terri with a wet washcloth. Terri was able to swallow these without trouble. Nurse Law also testified that Michael refused to allow any therapy whatsoever, including the usual range of motion exercises. Nurse Carla Saver Iyer had the most damning testimony. Iyer alleged that Michael would enter Terri's room, saying, "Has the bitch died yet?" Iyer says that Michael was "elated" each time Terri's condition worsened, telling her that when Terri died he was "going to be rich" and that he planned on buying a car, a boat, and traveling to Europe. Law and Iyer both allege that they heard Terri speak, saying, "help me" and "momma".

Michael Schiavo clearly has some explaining to do. A supposedly "loving" husband only carrying out his disabled wife's orders, surely wouldn't behave this way. The Schindlers, Terri's parents, further allege that Michael withheld antibiotics when Terri developed an infection, refused to clean her teeth for seven years and has kept her family and friends from visiting her. Most outrageously, when the feeding tube was disconnected and Terri lay dying, Michael also denied her last Communion - on the basis that the Host could be considered food.

Another oddity enters the case in the personage of Schiavo's lawyer, George Felos. Felos is a noted "right to die" lawyer, who has written a book on how he "communicates" with the souls of disabled people. Felos asserts that he can "hear their screams" and that they "want to be released." Felos was infuriated when Terri's feeding tube was replaced. He angrily fenounced the move, saying bizarrely that Terri's "deathbed experience was unlawfully stopped." Felos, a past member of the Hemlock Society, clearly hopes to advance along the Crusade of Death, with maybe a book and/or movie deal thrown in for good measure. Felos was Chairman of the Board of the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast, when Terri was secretly whisked out of the hospital and taken there to die.

What does Michael Schiavo gain from killing his wife? Both he and Felos have said that there is only about $60,000 left from the malpractice award monies, but they refuse to make bank account information available to either the Schindlers or the public. Michael's professed reasons for ending Terri's life ring particularly hollow in light of the fact that he has been living with his girlfriend since 1995. They have one child, and another is on the way. The Schindlers allegedly offered to let him keep the malpractice money if he would just divorce Terri and move on. So why won't he?

Several possible incentives exist. One is the insurance money. None was used as mandated on Terri's rehabilitation, and it could have been invested. By now the sum could be substantially higher, even with his legal fees. Fr. Robert Johansen has also theorized that, by divorcing Terri in a community property state, Michael stands to lose half of his possessions and other monies. Better just to kill her off and keep what's left of the insurance money and all of his worldly goods.

Terri's family believes that Michael is intent upon killing her for the same reason he denied her rehabilitation - he's got something to hide and he doesn't want Terri waking up and talking about it. Several medical documents in their possession lend credence to this theory.

Michael must be made to answer some very serious questions. If he isn't trying to end Terri's life for nefarious reasons there must be another answer. At the very least, he should be called to account on why he spent money earmarked for Terri's recovery instead on lawyers who are trying mightily to have her killed. ***

© 2003 Jennifer King

This is the first time I've ever seen this publication.  I'm going to browse through the rest of the site.