This is the most annoying line of ‘reasoning’ in those fighting for the Schindler’ right to re-insert the feeding tubes:
A lot of her details are out there
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Schiavo Links
I have not posted much about the Schiavo case. There are other blogs out there doing so. Below are some links. FindLaw has posted all of the opinions filed in the case here Outside the Beltway has consistently good posts…
BumperStickerist
John,
You’ve taken leave of your senses. You’re now in that happy, self-fulfilling, self-justifying land that AWOLBUSH people live in.
So, Terri’s off-hand comment made during a TV show to her husband includes ‘fed by a tube’? That he remembered lo those many years since she was first fed by a tube?
ummmm ….
yeah.
I’m stopping well short of Terri’s brother’s claims that Michael strangled her, et cetera. And I think referring to Terri Schiavo as ‘Terry Schindler-Schiavo’ is wrong headed ….
but, no matter.
Fwiw – you’re putting a *tremendous* amount of faith in an official court record in which Terri’s interests do not seem to be represented at first and are now, seemingly, irrelevant.
But, you’re in high dudgeon.
Enjoy.
Say “Hi!” to Oliver for me.
doc nos
Although this is a small point, it is an important one. It’s one easily missed by most of the people who would continue to use TS as they rant about starvation and the like.
Thank you for making it.
Shana Barrow
And you, Bumper Stickerist, are putting a tremendous amount of good faith in your own fucking emotions.
Jerry Jasperson
Outstanding.
How many of you out there can comprehend Terri’s situation? Would you be so willing to live with the lack of cogent thought, or the persistent bed sores that she must endure, or how about the pain of muscles that have long atrophied?
Why are most, so called, “conservatives” ready to use this woman as nothing more than a political pawn when they truly don’t know anything about her or her husband?
Thanks for airing a truly conservative philosophy that limits the governments abilities to interject into our daily lives!
Steve Talbert
Terri does not have the physical capacity to experience emotions – that means pain, hunger, joy, whatever – because that part of her brain liquified several years ago. Removing the feeding tubes are exactly what are listed in the Texas law that Bush signed as invasive procedures which a health care provider in that state can determine it will not continue with – even over the objections of the patient and/or the legal guardians.
TJ Jackson
I must admit this sounds more like Oliver than anything else. But it does illustrate where we stand as a nation when we can advocate the killing of the helpless while defending terrorists. I have seen nothing that demonstrates this woman asked to die nor have I heard anything that demonstrates she is “brain dead” on the contrary it appears that those who indicate her condition is hopeless are the ones that would rather strave her to death than allow her a painless injection. Say hello to Willis for me.
tom scott
Once again: John, I don’t think you’re anti-god–just pro Peter Singer.
But to offer something from a thread going on at Ace of Spades: “On the other hand, they point out that as Terri’s “husband,” he is her closest living relative, and her fate should rest solely with him.
Well if he’s her husband, then he’s certainly guilty of adultery, as well as de facto bigamy. Sounds like open-and-shut grounds for divorce to me.”
I swear on the Peter Singer bible that the day after she told Michael that she would not want to be kept alive that she told me-in the strictest confidence-that if her husband were ever unfaithful to her that she would want a divorce. I won’t change my story for even $1.6 million because I am principled.
Scott Chaffin
This is confusing. Are you even reading what you’re linking?
I’ve never seen a dialysis machine at McDonalds, either. Nor have I seen a colostomy bag in my kitchen. What’s the point?
Scott Chaffin
Hunger and pain are emotions? Wanna try that one again, Steve?
Jay
John, here’s my biggest beef with this entire case:
How does a court have the authority to decide whether a person lives or dies based on hearsay evidence? Especially when that hearsay evidence comes from a man, Michael Schiavo, who has a clear conflict of interest? Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not attacking him or saying he’s done anything wrong. His motives could be 100% on the up and up.
That doesn’t matter. He did stand (before he had to fight the long legal battle) to gain financially from her death, and he has been with another woman for the last 8 years, with whom he has fathered two children.
Hearsay evidence is not admitted at all in any criminal cases except under special circumstances.Yet, the court in this case, has decided upon whether a person lives or dies on that same kind of evidence.
Katherine
John, I thought you might be interested in these excerpts from the House debate.
BumperStickerist
Shana – my emotions, fucking or not, have nothing to do with this. As near as I can tell I’m equally pissed at both sides.
There’s a whole time-line based backstory to Michael’s case that falls well short of ‘Loving Husband …. hard decision’
Which does not make this illegal … just immoral.
kennedy joss
I’m confused.
The Republicans for years have reviled government intrusion into people’s lives, and have trumpeted the marital bond. Now, Michael Schiavo’s word is nothing, and the government has turned itself inside out to interfere in this already exhaustively litigated case.
W signs a 1999 law in Texas saying if a patient can’t pay, a hospital can pull the plug regardless of the wishes of the family or the patient’s prospects of improvement. Doesn’t sound like a “culture of life” to me, sounds like a culture of cash.
W now is proposing huge cuts in Medicare, upon which Schiavo has depended for a decade. W is attacking trial lawyers, without whom Schiavo would be long dead.
W attacks ‘activist judges,’ but the Schiavos will appeal until they find one.
200 people who AREN’T in a vegetative state die every day because they don’t have health insurance, and W is doing all he can to cut health care even more.
How, again, is GOP involvement in the Schiavo case about ‘moral values’?
Scott Chaffin
How does a court have the authority to decide whether a person lives or dies based on hearsay evidence?
I’ve been asking that question, in various forms, for three days. So far, the best answer is the Cloak of Invincibility you get when you say “I do.”
Scott Chaffin
I’m confused.
Twue, vewwy twue.
susan
Oh great, glad this is clarified. So, it is good to know that having a ‘tube’ inserted into “a patients’s stomache is an ‘extraordinary’ measure both from a realistic standpoint and a legal standpoint” because had not Christopher Reeves died, he would have been left with a bodyless mind of a shell completely incapacitated and unable to feel pain, or ever having sex since his bodyless-mind existance connected to a multitude of lesser intrusive and ‘extraordinary’ life supporting measures, including the ablity to breath, would have caused so much misery for himself, his family, the doctors, and society as a whole that we can assure ourselves these are burdens we would never again wish upon anyone?
So, what is the point of embryonic stem cell cures when all you have to do is convince people to sign living wills that will allow society to convince all that to terminate your life, if faced with such a delimma, is the best possible option over of having to live and endure such ‘extraordinary’ measures as ‘extraordinary’ as a feeding tube?
Seems easier and most cost effective to simply convince every a disabled life to terminate itself until which time we have butchered enough embryos in the hopes of somehow finding a cure which will prevent human beings from having to suffer an existence filled with ‘extraordinary’ life-supporting measures.
susan
Gee kennedy didn’t you get the point of the post, who needs health care when ‘extraordinary’ measures cause so much misery. Things like surgery, or pill popping are extraordinary measures. How about all the AIDS patients suffering from all those pervasive drugs day after day year after year while their bodies slowly rot away in extraordinary pain or cancer patients faced with such extraordinary measures as chemotheraphy to extend one’s life for just a few months worth of misery?
Where does this argument ‘extraordinary’ draw the line when we are dealing with life and death?
tansy
i hope more people pay attention to the comments by kennedy joss-especially about bush’s 1999 legislation in texas..i think that a lot of republicans are acting like giddy alzheimer patients…
Buttermyself
Gee kennedy didn’t you get the point of the post, who needs health care when ‘extraordinary’ measures cause so much misery. Things like surgery, or pill popping are extraordinary measures. How about all the AIDS patients suffering from all those pervasive drugs day after day year after year while their bodies slowly rot away in extraordinary pain or cancer patients faced with such extraordinary measures as chemotheraphy to extend one’s life for just a few months worth of misery?
susan, how did you get to be so stupid?
Hektor
The husband speaks for the wife, the wife speaks for the husband. That is marriage.
Scott Chaffin
There’s that word again. How come Shana the Comment Cop never writes tickets for that?
armchair genius
It is true there is a lot of information out there – most of it is probably a complete fabrication or half-truth. There are statements on many prominent pro-terri sites that are absolutely false. If you read all the available decisions on the Schiavo case from Florida, it is overwhelming clear that there was not simply some evidence that Terri wanted to die in this situation and that she is in fact in PVS, it is clear and convincing evidence.
It really isn’t even close, all the parents have is that Terri was raised as a roman catholic and that their daughter would never go against their religious views. But the evidence shows that she had. And her husband, some of the husband’s siblings, other friends of Terri all testified that she made statements that she would not want to be kept alive in this type of a circumstance. Her parents cannot even say she said something different to them – they have no evidence frankly.
Judge Greer is not the only judge that feels this way. A panel of 3 appellate judges reviewed all the evidence de novo and stated they would find the same way as Judge Greer.
And I suspect, if the merits are ever reached, the federal courts will hold the same.
Aaron
Have we learned nothing from “Logan’s Run?”
I am so depressed.
Lucky I live in Taiwan and this is not major news here.
Scott Chaffin
A panel of 3 appellate judges reviewed all the evidence de novo
That’s news. All I’ve seen is concurrence from any of the appelate courts that the law was applied correctly, but no review of the facts. Where did you find this? I’d like to look at it.
Sav
“W signs a 1999 law in Texas saying if a patient can’t pay, a hospital can pull the plug regardless of the wishes of the family or the patient’s prospects of improvement. Doesn’t sound like a “culture of life” to me, sounds like a culture of cash.”
Regardless of what one thinks of Bush’s decision in 99, that situation and the one currently being argued over are not comparable. Terri Schiavo is not on life support; there is no plug to pull. She is simply not being fed. The Texas law would not apply in this case.
I know political gotcha is the weapon dejour these days on both sides, but this isn’t even a proper example to use as such.
susan
Butternothing
Sarcasim escapes you?
By the way, if you’ve ever had chemo then you’d know the meaning of ‘extraordinary’ such measures taken to save one’s life.
Scott Chaffin
a 1999 law that was crafted by a Democratic legislature, passed both houses unanimously, and extended the protected period for futile care patients.
Don’t forget that part, the next time the lie gets told.
Richard Bennett
Good post, John, and all your work on this subject is excellent.
It disturbs me deeply to see so many of my conservative friends checking their brains at the door and jumping aboard the Terri Schiavo Cult Train, piling lie upon lie in order to better exploit the poor turnip in the name of ancillary causes like abortion, mommy knows best, domestic violence, and even eating disorders.
She’s lived out the meaningful part of her life and deserves the right to die in peace without being made a pinata for Tom DeLay’s rehabilitation.
Of course, my main issue is federalism, and the “err hugely on the side of Life, brothers and sisters and give me a big amen on that” people are willing to sacrifice it to their fetish.
This is some sick shit.
susan
Sick shit is believing a man who had abandoned his wife years ago, breaking his vow ‘to love in sickness and in health’ through his action of fucking another women and living with her, consequently bearing two illegitiment children while refusing his legal wife any opportunity for possible recovery, sealing all documents concerning her status yet considers himself somehow the one who knows his wife best. Sick shit is believing that the wife who was abandoned by her husband years ago, a husband who bore several children outside the marriage, has NOT been given her own legal representation in a situation which cannot not adequately provide verification nor clarity as to the wife’s wishes except for the words of a husband who has proven his word means nothing when he broke his vows of marriage.
Is the husband at his wife’s bedside watching over her as she slowly starves to death? Why is he not there comforting her through her long and anquishing misery as husbands vow to do when taking their vow to love in sickness and in health.
I do agree that involving Congress overstepped the bounds however, only one judge ruled in this case, the other judges rule upon the law, had overstepped his bounds by not allowing Terry the right to representation in a case where the husband had broken his vows of marriage and can no longer be seen as her guardian since he chose to abandon her years ago.
That said, when will the culture of death begin to convince human beings the assumption that severly brain-damaged humans would not wish to live because the culture of death is convinced such a life is worthless and that ending thier lives if far preferable than having Enlightened people deal with human suffering?
susan
Sick shit is killing brain-damaged human beings while at the very same time advocating the use of ‘discarded’ human embryos to somehow create such a thing as ‘stem cell cure’ for those brain-damaged lives people have akready determined worthless.
Can Enlightened people possibly see the irony in all this?
over it
She was appointed an outside impartial representative. He agrees with her husband and her doctors and the courts and the judges and the majority of the American people(who, with the exception of her husband and her doctors, should have no place in this).
It was not just one judge…it has now been many judges….and may well end up including the SCOTUS judges as well. If it does….even SCALIA feels that the government has NO place in these decisions…read his opinion on the Nancy Cruzan case. In fact…I will post it next.
It disgusts me how much taxpayer time and money has been spent on this unlawful intrusion into a private family and their private decisions.
Over it.
over it
JUSTICE SCALIA, concurring.
The various opinions in this case portray quite clearly the difficult, indeed agonizing, questions that are presented by the constantly increasing power of science to keep the human body alive for longer than any reasonable person would want to inhabit it. The States have begun to grapple with these problems through legislation. I am concerned, from the tenor of today’s opinions, that we are poised to confuse that enterprise as successfully as we have confused the enterprise of legislating concerning abortion — requiring it to be conducted against a background of federal constitutional imperatives that are unknown because they are being newly crafted from Term to Term. That would be a great misfortune.
While I agree with the Court’s analysis today, and therefore join in its opinion, I would have preferred that we announce, clearly and promptly, that the federal courts have no business in this field; that American law has always accorded the State the power to prevent, by force if necessary, suicide — including suicide by refusing to take appropriate measures necessary to preserve one’s life; that the point at which life becomes “worthless,” and the point at which the means necessary to preserve it become “extraordinary” or “inappropriate,” are neither set forth in the Constitution nor known to the nine Justices of this Court any better than they are known to nine people picked at random from the Kansas City telephone directory; and hence, that even when it is demonstrated by clear and convincing evidence that a patient no longer wishes certain measures to be taken to preserve his or her life, it is up to the citizens of Missouri to decide, through their elected representatives, whether that wish will be honored. It is quite impossible (because the Constitution says nothing about the matter) that those citizens will decide upon a line less lawful than the one we would choose; and it is unlikely (because we know no more about “life and death” than they do) that they will decide upon a line less reasonable.
Bob
I wonder if this was in Texas there would be any debate. I wonder if Medicaid was chipping in (they may not after the next budget passes) or if there never was a trust fund from that frivolous lawsuit didn’t exist if the Republicans would still be intruding on this issue.
Of course they would, if they could get some political mileage out of it. Otherwise, Tom DeLay wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.
Futile care in W’s Texas: indigence means death.
Bob
if Medicaid wasn’t chipping in
BumperStickerist
John, if he’s reading comments this far down, might appreciate the fact that this took place in the 80’s, before Irony died.
How do we *know* that Terri was not being Ironic when she made her statements?
I mean, if you were watching “The Other Side of the Mountain” in 1983 and make some comment, half in jest after a couple of beers, “Man, if that happened to me, just pull the plug” … would you want those words to be the basis for pulling a feeding tube twenty years later leading to your starving to death?
Hmmmmmm?
And, fwiw, the ‘Her Brain is Gone’ has enough counter arguments from equally qualified, non-hysterical people (e.g. codeblueblog) to at least warrant consideration.
Rather than simply reading Majikthise’s links and proclaiming ‘her brain isn’t there’.
Ernest Brown
Martin McPhillips nails it:
Peggy Noonan regains form today as she takes notice of the “in love with death” crowd’s feverish clamor in support of starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo. Here’s a sample, selected because it mentions the demonic countenance of the most foul individual in American politics:
Everyone who has written in defense of Mrs. Schiavo’s right to live has received e-mail blasts full of attacks that appear to have been dictated by the unstable and typed by the unhinged. On Democratic Underground they crowed about having “kicked the sh– out of the fascists.” On Tuesday James Carville’s face was swept with a sneer so convulsive you could see his gums as he damned the Republicans trying to help Mrs. Schiavo. It would have seemed demonic if he weren’t a buffoon.
Why are they so committed to this woman’s death?
They seem to have fallen half in love with death.
What does Terri Schiavo’s life symbolize to them? What does the idea that she might continue to live suggest to them?
That’s my boldface emphasis, added to draw attention to Carville’s name.
“Why are they so committed to this woman’s death?” There are short and long answers to that question. The long answer demands an examination of how seemingly iron-clad American and Western values have been inverted, and how this particular case stands up as a test of that inversion in the minds of the culture of death crowd. So, let’s try the short answer. These are the people who also hope that the person out on the ledge jumps, who want to watch the plunge and steal a thrill from the agony of the jumper and the “naivete” of those who care and don’t want the person to do it.
While that short answer neglects all of the profound challenges laying siege to the values of our civilization, it gets right down to the immediate essence of a horrible slob like James Carville and the benighted crazies at Democratic Underground that he cultivates. Not to suggest that the culture of death brigades are restricted to that sad realm.
http://mcphillips.blogspot.com/2005/03/bizarre-passion-of-pull-tube-people.html