Shin
|
|
« on: March 31, 2011, 10:59:47 PM » |
|
AVE MARIA, Florida, March 31, 2011 (LifeSiteNews Excerpts) - On March 31, 2005, a Florida woman who was at the center of an intense nationwide controversy took her last breath, after thirteen days without food or water.
A bouquet of flowers sat in a vase of water next to the bed where Terri Schiavo lay, forbidden under court order from receiving the water she needed to sustain her life.
Six years later, Terri’s family reverently recalled their loved one’s struggle to live, a struggle that became a measure of America’s conscience after attempts to overrule husband Michael Schiavo’s decision to withdraw her nutrition and hydration went as far as the United States Congress.
“This was not an isolated case. What happened to Terri happens all the time in our country,” said Schindler. “There’s tens of thousands of others with the same type of cognitive disabilites that need our protection, our love and our compassion.”
Terri Schindler Schiavo suffered severe brain damage due to oxygen deprivation under mysterious circumstances in 1990. Her family members say that her husband Michael refused rehabilitation therapy for twelve years, which would have greatly improved her condition. Instead, Schiavo, who had moved in with another woman, fought Terri’s family to end her life by removing her feeding tube.
Despite drastic measures by then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the U.S. Congress and former President George W. Bush, Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Court Judge George Greer ended the dispute by forbidding Terri from receiving food or water - whether through a feeding tube or by mouth.
“Terri was not dying, people thought she had some kind of terminal illness ... there was no machines keeping her alive, she simply had a cognitive disability,” said Schindler. “The public just doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s easy to rationalize why we’re doing this to people like my sister.”
“There’s not a day that goes by we don’t think about Terri,” he said. “Having to watch a loved one die in such a horrible way - it’s something you never forget. You live with it every day.”
|