Terri Schiavo Should Be Allowed To Die
Bush the Savior
There you are, and the worst happens: your wife dies after a sudden heart attack.
Somehow, you get through the surreal nightmare of the funeral and all the rest, and begin the grieving process.
Several years down the road, if you’re lucky, your life has more or less returned to normal.
But not for Michael Schiavo. For him, the nightmare has continued for all of the last fifteen years.
As a side-effect of bulimia in February 1990, Terri Schiavo suffered a heart attack and sustained severe non-reversible brain damage as a result of prolonged oxygen deprivation during resuscitation.
The doctor’s diagnosis was that she was in a persistent vegetative state, with no hope of rehabilitation. She had almost no cerebral cortex left – it’s just gone, apparently as a result of the heart attack and oxygen deprivation. She could not feed herself; she had to wear diapers. She was, for all intents and purposes, “brain dead.” She had no cognitive abilities left; she was not self-aware.
Michael Schiavo disregarded the doctor’s advice and retained some hope she could get better. Against all odds, for the next eight years, different rehabilitation therapies were tried – but all to no avail.
So then after eight long years of torture, finally convinced his wife was truly not coming back, Michael Schiavo reluctantly petitioned the court to have her feeding tube taken out – allowing Terri to finish the process of dying.
But Terri’s parents opposed this in court, and she was kept alive, against the wishes of her husband.
And the un-ending nightmare for Michael Schiavo continues.
Terri remains today in the persistent vegetative state she entered fifteen years ago, with no improvements at all. Nothing has changed from 1990. The doctors all agree that barring divine intervention, there is no hope whatsoever for any recovery.
But her parents, the Schindlers, persist in their mindless quest to keep her body alive.
This is so sad.
I really and truly feel sorry for the Schindlers. I can understand the pain they are suffering; no parent wants to see their child die. It’s inconceivable a child should predecease a parent.
But their daughter has died, and they’re deluding themselves if they think there’s any chance of her returning. All that made Terri Schiavo unique and alive is gone, irretrievably lost. What’s left is just the empty vessel that once carried the essence of her soul. To think otherwise is denial, in its very most severe form.
The Schindlers need to stop this nonsense, now, and let Terri go.
While the Schindler’s intervention is somewhat understandable, the intervention of Bush and the Congress is unconscionable.
They’ve turned the whole case into a cause celebre for the right-to-life, right-to-die movement. They’re capturing headlines now on a daily basis, the latest of which features President Bush actually interrupting his vacation to fly back to Washington DC to sign a special law allowing the Schindlers to intervene yet again.
This whole thing disgusts me.
The Republicans are trying to inflict their right-wing moral judgments onto Michael Schiavo solely in order to make a high-profile political statement.
The whole thing is quite absurd.
The courts have consistently found in favor of Michael Schiavo. The Schindlers have lost at every turn. It’s unlikely that this new review in federal court will go any differently than all the others. So all Bush and Congress have done is postpone the inevitable.
Just for political gain.
This is dead wrong.
In the words of Michael Schiavo, “Mr. Bush should be ashamed of himself.”
Bush and Congress have no business at all getting involved in a personal decision like this. They need to but-out now, before they inflict any more harm.
God, I feel sorry for Michael Schiavo.