"Our family has asked Randall Terry and his staff to once again coordinate the efforts to rescue Terri from the clutches of death by judicial homicide. We ask you to help my daughter, Terri, by following Randall's lead, and cooperating with and supporting the efforts we have asked him to undertake. We thank you with all our hearts for your concern for our daughter, and for your help in trying to save her."
-- Bob Schindler, Father of Terri Schiavo
UPDATE: A federal judge is reviewing whether to impose an emergency injunction to reinsert Terri Schiavo's feeding tube and has called a 3 p.m. EST hearing into the matter.
The parents of Terri Schiavo asked a judge to reinsert the brain-damaged woman's feeding tube Monday, following an extraordinary political fight that consumed both chambers of Congress and prompted the president to rush back to the White House.
An attorney for Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, arrived at federal district court in Tampa and filed a request for an emergency injunction to keep their daughter fed.
The Vatican newspaper on Monday criticized the removal of a feeding tube from a brain-damaged Florida woman, saying nobody can claim the right to decide whether a human being lives or dies.
3 comments:
this is not your fight. this also is not your business. this is not murder. it is a travesty to keep a woman alive because the family is selfish.
READ the truth, will you?
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7257835/
WASHINGTON - Terri Schiavo, at the center of an emotional and political storm over whether she should be allowed to die, will almost certainly never recover from her unconscious condition, neurologists agree.
She is in a permanent vegetative state, and no one has ever come back from such a condition, according to the American Academy of Neurology.
“Approximately 10,000 to 25,000 adults and 6,000 to 10,000 children in the United States are diagnosed as being in the persistent vegetative state,” the Multi-Society Task Force on Persistent Vegetative State says in its 1995 guidelines on the condition, the latest available.
“Survival beyond 10 years is unusual. The chance for survival of greater than 15 years is approximately 1 in 15,000 to 1 in 75,000,” it adds.
While most neurologists agree that recovery is almost impossible, the decision on whether and how long to keep such a patient alive is usually left to the individual doctor and the patient’s guardian.
Schiavo has been in the condition, which is far more severe than a coma, since she had a heart attack in 1990 that deprived her brain of oxygen. Under the medical definition, that became a permanent state after a month.
Her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, has fought to allow her to die and courts have supported him.
The tube was removed on Friday after Florida courts rejected numerous last-ditch legal attempts by the parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, to keep their daughter alive. But early in the hours of Monday morning President Bush signed a bill allowing federal courts to again intervene in the matter.
NOW CATCH THIS NEXT PART:
The Schindlers believe their daughter responds to them and her condition could improve with treatment. Tennessee Sen. Bill Frist, a surgeon and Senate majority leader, has viewed videotapes and agrees.
But Dr. Ronald Cranford, a neurologist and bioethicist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, said reflexes can fool non-specialists.
“To the families and loved ones, and to inexperienced health care professionals, PVS patients often look fairly 'normal,'" Cranford said in a statement.
“Their eyes are open and moving about during the periods of wakefulness that alternate with periods of sleep; there may be spontaneous movements of the arms and legs, and at times these patients appear to smile, grimace, laugh, utter guttural sounds, groan and moan, and manifest other facial expressions and sounds that appear to reflect cognitive functions and emotions, especially in the eyes of the family.”
Such patients can even squeeze a hand in response to a caress, Swedish Covenant Hospital in Chicago says in guidance posted on its Internet Web site.
“Sadly, these actions often appear meaningful to hopeful families but are all automatic reflexes -- not movements with a purpose,” it reads.
“There are no confirmed reports of anyone fully recovering from a permanent vegetative state lasting more than three months.”
This is because in such patients, the cerebral cortex has been destroyed, said Dr. Lawrence Schneiderman, a physician and bioethicist at the University of California, San Diego.
“Four to six minutes of anoxia, lack of oxygen, destroys that completely,” Schneiderman wrote in comments posted on the Internet at http:/seeingthedifference.berkeley.edu/schneiderman.html
“The rest of your brain, particularly the brain stem, can survive for fifteen or twenty minutes without oxygen,” added Schneiderman, who signed a friend of the court brief in July of last year supporting Michael Schiavo.
“What happens is that part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, which is us, our personality, who we are, how we think — our capacity to experience, see, hear, think, emote — that may be permanently destroyed.”
Experts say Terri Schiavo would experience no discomfort if allowed to die, as the part of her brain that experiences pain is unlikely to be functioning.
Raven:
I as a human being can not just stand by and watch a women STARVE to death. If I locked you in a room and let you starve to death you would then call it murder.
Her husband may have been trying to kill this poor women for years. What gives any of us a right to determine when a life no longer has value. This is not selfishness, it's compassion!
This woman has already been dead for fifteen years. Congress is trying to play God by keeping her "alive". They have no right to violate the Constitution and play God. Would you want Tom DeLay to keep you alive if your cerebral cortex had disentegrated into spinal fluid? What would you do if your closest loved one was in this situation? There are thousands of people in America hooked on life support right now, why is this woman's case so important?
The culture of life rhetoric is completely inconsistent and hypocritical. Where was the culture of life when the U.S. was bombing Iraq two years ago and killing thousands of innocent people? If you're so worried about this ONE PERSON starving to death then where were you during the U.S. sanctions on Iraq and how are you helping to solve starvation in Africa? I was raised Catholic and taught to respect all of God's creation, not just the creation that can be used for political gain.
Post a Comment