Terri Schiavo died this morning...
Apr. 1st, 2005 01:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
agilebritWell, Terri died this morning. Our government mandated that a woman who committed no crime, who wasn’t dying, who had left no written instructions about a feeding tube--should be starved to death. The court order mandated that no one was allowed to even attempt to feed her by mouth, thus signing her death warrant. I guess being inconvenient to a spouse can now get you capital punishment.
You know, a newborn puppy has very little knowledge of its surroundings. It’s blind and deaf. What if a person had a bitch who had a litter of puppies, decided he didn’t want the bother of them…and locked them in a room until they starved to death? Can you imagine the outrage? Can you imagine what a judge would do to that person?
Christopher Reeves was more dependent on medical technology than Terri was. He was on a respirator as well as a feeding tube. What if his wife had said, Nah, I don’t want the bother anymore, I’m tired of taking care of this guy--let’s take out his feeding tube. But keep the respirator on, because starving to death is a euphoric way to go and it’s not that horrible, but suffocation is bad. Besides, removing the tube is “allowing him to die,” whereas turning off the respirator would be killing him, and we don’t want to do that. Oh, he doesn’t want the feeding tube out? Too bad, he’s dependent. His life isn’t really worth living, guy can’t even move. Let’s allow him to die. Really, he told me once that he wouldn’t want to be kept alive this way. He says he’s changed his mind? He’s not competent to make that choice.
You know, if Michael Schiavo lived in Utah, we’d have gotten him for bigamy. That’s how we got Tom Green--the law here says that if you’re living with someone in a marital relationship, then you’re married both in fact and in law. All the people screaming about the “sanctity of marriage” are forgetting the inconvenient fact that Michael abandoned his marital relationship with Terri a long time ago. They also forget that sanctity of life trumps sanctity of marriage.
And isn’t this interesting…Looky who the Chairman of the Board was for the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast--George Felos, Michael Schiavo‘s lawyer. He’s also a member of the Hemlock Society (recently changed its name to the less-inflammatory “End-of-Life Choices“)--as is Dr. Ronald Cranford, his hand-picked “expert” who testified that Terri is in a persistent vegetative state, and who thought that someone like Nancy Cruzan (who was able to swallow and was spoon-fed--and only had a feeding tube inserted to make her care easier) should have been starved to death…and eventually was. Nice. Really nice. This particular doctor has been wrong about PVS before, by the way. And the current registered agent for HFS is Mary Labyak, who was also on the board of the “Partnership for Caring,” a pro-euthanasia group.
In fact, the whole bunch of people involved in Terri’s death is incestuous. Check this out:
Dr. Ronald Cranford was a member of the board of the former Euthanasia Society of America, which eventually merged with Partnership for Caring.
Partnership for Caring lists Mary Labyak as a current member of their Board of Directors; she is also the CEO of the hospice where Terri Schiavo lived.
Both George Felos and Barbara Sheen Todd have served on the Board of Directors for that same hospice; Mr. Felos was in fact the Chairman of the Board until Terri Schiavo was moved there.
Barbara Sheen Todd serves as a Pinellas County commissioner.
Judge George Greer served with her for eight years; it is he who ordered Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube removed.
He also appointed a supposedly "neutral" neurologist, Dr. Peter Bambakidis of Ohio, to break the tie between doctors who disagreed about Terri's diagnosis.
Dr. Bambakidis had never before testified in a case like Terri's, but his brother and George Felos have both served as officers in the American Hellenic Education Progressive Association.
Can you say “conflict of interest”? I thought you could.
I’m the last person to advocate euthanasia. I think that a doctor who kills a patient on purpose, even if that patient asks them to do so, violates the most basic precept of the Hippocratic Oath. But part of what really upset me about this case was the absolute dishonesty with which everyone who wanted her to die dealt with it. They weren’t “killing her.” They were “allowing her to die”--they were somehow able to fool themselves into thinking that a death by dehydration that takes two weeks is a “nice” way to go. In a case like this, I’d rather they just injected her with the Blue Juice. At least then they would have been faced with the fact that what they were doing was causing her death.
At least she’s getting an autopsy. The results will be interesting--if they let us see them.
This whole thing makes me very sad and angry.
I'm disabling comments on this. I don't want to fight, I just wanted to vent. I know I'm probably in the minority amongst my flist on this particular issue.
You know, a newborn puppy has very little knowledge of its surroundings. It’s blind and deaf. What if a person had a bitch who had a litter of puppies, decided he didn’t want the bother of them…and locked them in a room until they starved to death? Can you imagine the outrage? Can you imagine what a judge would do to that person?
Christopher Reeves was more dependent on medical technology than Terri was. He was on a respirator as well as a feeding tube. What if his wife had said, Nah, I don’t want the bother anymore, I’m tired of taking care of this guy--let’s take out his feeding tube. But keep the respirator on, because starving to death is a euphoric way to go and it’s not that horrible, but suffocation is bad. Besides, removing the tube is “allowing him to die,” whereas turning off the respirator would be killing him, and we don’t want to do that. Oh, he doesn’t want the feeding tube out? Too bad, he’s dependent. His life isn’t really worth living, guy can’t even move. Let’s allow him to die. Really, he told me once that he wouldn’t want to be kept alive this way. He says he’s changed his mind? He’s not competent to make that choice.
You know, if Michael Schiavo lived in Utah, we’d have gotten him for bigamy. That’s how we got Tom Green--the law here says that if you’re living with someone in a marital relationship, then you’re married both in fact and in law. All the people screaming about the “sanctity of marriage” are forgetting the inconvenient fact that Michael abandoned his marital relationship with Terri a long time ago. They also forget that sanctity of life trumps sanctity of marriage.
And isn’t this interesting…Looky who the Chairman of the Board was for the Hospice of the Florida Suncoast--George Felos, Michael Schiavo‘s lawyer. He’s also a member of the Hemlock Society (recently changed its name to the less-inflammatory “End-of-Life Choices“)--as is Dr. Ronald Cranford, his hand-picked “expert” who testified that Terri is in a persistent vegetative state, and who thought that someone like Nancy Cruzan (who was able to swallow and was spoon-fed--and only had a feeding tube inserted to make her care easier) should have been starved to death…and eventually was. Nice. Really nice. This particular doctor has been wrong about PVS before, by the way. And the current registered agent for HFS is Mary Labyak, who was also on the board of the “Partnership for Caring,” a pro-euthanasia group.
In fact, the whole bunch of people involved in Terri’s death is incestuous. Check this out:
Dr. Ronald Cranford was a member of the board of the former Euthanasia Society of America, which eventually merged with Partnership for Caring.
Partnership for Caring lists Mary Labyak as a current member of their Board of Directors; she is also the CEO of the hospice where Terri Schiavo lived.
Both George Felos and Barbara Sheen Todd have served on the Board of Directors for that same hospice; Mr. Felos was in fact the Chairman of the Board until Terri Schiavo was moved there.
Barbara Sheen Todd serves as a Pinellas County commissioner.
Judge George Greer served with her for eight years; it is he who ordered Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube removed.
He also appointed a supposedly "neutral" neurologist, Dr. Peter Bambakidis of Ohio, to break the tie between doctors who disagreed about Terri's diagnosis.
Dr. Bambakidis had never before testified in a case like Terri's, but his brother and George Felos have both served as officers in the American Hellenic Education Progressive Association.
Can you say “conflict of interest”? I thought you could.
I’m the last person to advocate euthanasia. I think that a doctor who kills a patient on purpose, even if that patient asks them to do so, violates the most basic precept of the Hippocratic Oath. But part of what really upset me about this case was the absolute dishonesty with which everyone who wanted her to die dealt with it. They weren’t “killing her.” They were “allowing her to die”--they were somehow able to fool themselves into thinking that a death by dehydration that takes two weeks is a “nice” way to go. In a case like this, I’d rather they just injected her with the Blue Juice. At least then they would have been faced with the fact that what they were doing was causing her death.
At least she’s getting an autopsy. The results will be interesting--if they let us see them.
This whole thing makes me very sad and angry.
I'm disabling comments on this. I don't want to fight, I just wanted to vent. I know I'm probably in the minority amongst my flist on this particular issue.
