OrthodoxNet.com Blog

This is an extended talk given by David Gibbs, lawyer to Terri Schiavo and eyewittness to her malady, and ultimately her death.

Fighting for Dear Life Video

GOPUSA | Rachel Alexander June 27, 2007

Don’t expect to find this miraculous story in the pages of the New York Times or featured on CNN, because it would undermine their pro-euthanasia political agenda. In Arizona, a woman had doctors remove food, water, and medicine life support from her husband, Jesse Ramirez, a few days after he entered a coma due to a car rollover accident on May 30. Ramirez, a Gulf War veteran, and his wife had been arguing in the car over a cell phone number of another man that Ramirez found in her cell phone when the rollover happened. Ramirez suffered a broken neck, fractured skull and face, punctured lung and broken ribs. Only 10 days after the accident, his wife instructed doctors to remove all life support from him. His family objected and the Alliance Defense Fund filed an emergency motion with the court on their behalf. Maricopa County Superior court Judge Paul Katz wisely ordered on June 13 that Ramirez be put back on life support and assigned a guardian ad litem as his advocate while the legal arguments were sorted out. Ramirez’s wife responded by petitioning the court again asking to remove him from life support.

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AMARILLO, Texas, Mar. 31 /Christian Newswire/ — Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, commented today on the murder of Terri Schiavo two years ago this day.

He became a familiar figure in the lengthy ordeal. A friend of Terri’s family, he was one of the few people on her visitors’ list and therefore able to access her room.

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Townhall.com Chuck Colson May 24, 2006

Michael Schiavo has published a book titled Terri: The Truth. It is about his well-known and, unfortunately, successful fight to end his wife’s life. Opening this book is like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole and ending up in a new and bizarre world.

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Wesley Smith blog

I have always believed that Terri Schiavo could hear. This was based on conversations I had with people who were with her, and on the videos posted on the Internet. One in particular struck me: Terri is asked to open her eyes. There is a pause. Her eyes remain shut. Then, they flutter. Then, she opens her eyes. Then, she opens them so wide it wrinkes her forehead. This was no mere reflex.

After the autopsy, those who supported her dehydration pointed to the finding that she was probably blind. Therefore, they said, she could not have reacted to her mother’s love.

But she could have if she could hear.

This study (subscription only) demonstrates that unconscious people appear to hear, or at least, their brains react to speech almost like a conscious person’s. Whether they can interpret these sounds is not known.

As far as I am concerned, this shouldn’t matter. A human life has intrinsic value simply because it is. But some don’t believe that. Hence, this study should provide definite food for thought in the ongoing struggle over the intrinsic value of all human life and in establishing proper ethical approaches to caring for those with profound cognitive disabilities.

VATICAN CITY, July 27, 2005 (LifeSiteNews.com) President of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Heath Care, Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, said this week, in relation to the death by dehydration of Terri Schiavo, that food and water are never considered medicine.

“Let’s stop with the euphemisms — they killed her,” he emphasized, according to a Catholic News Agency report.

“To remove [food and water] means euthanasia, it means killing, and so this woman was killed by hunger and starvation. Let’s stop with the euphemisms they killed her,” he said. “Food and hydration are never considered medicine.”

Criticizing the legal framework that allowed an otherwise non-terminal woman from being put to death, Cardinal Barragan added, “many times there are laws that are called laws but are nothing more than arbitrary norms.”

Source: LifeSiteNews.com (lsn@lifesite.net)

“Terri Schiavo’s Autopsy: The Blind Spot” by Sherry Eros, MD

Human Events Link: http://www.humaneventsonline.com/

Direct Link to article: http://www.intellectualconservative.com/article4420.html

Highlights of article refuting the PVS diagnosis include:

By reference to the medical literature adduces evidence that a substantial portion of the loss in Terri’s brain weight observed postmortem may have been due to the dehydration to which she was subjected.

By reference to the medical literature adduces evidence that Terri’s much-vaunted total cortical blindness may also be attributable to dehydration.

Refutes the Medical Examiners’ suggestion that their autopsy findings are “very consistent with” the PVS diagnosis and that for years Terri Schiavo was unable to see, recognize her family, think, or exercise any of the other higher mental functions that distinguish human life.
Refutes the Medical Examiners’ suggestion that their autopsy findings prove that Terri Schiavo suffered irreversible brain damage and would not have benefited from rehabilitation.

Critiques poor medical and scientific reasoning and misleading statements by the Medical Examiners who performed the autopsy, as well as by the mainstream media and medical experts who supported the Medical Examiners’ misinterpretation of the findings.

Catholic Citizens

Blind, Deaf, and Dumb: If Terri Schiavo had been dehydrated to death at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, would Dick Durbin be reading her autopsy report from the Senate floor?
6/19/2005 3:23:00 PM
By American Spectator - George Neumayr

If Terri Schiavo had been dehydrated to death at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, Dick Durbin would be reading her autopsy report from the Senate floor. It would be an occasion for great moral anguish. How did the U.S. sink so low as to adopt such Nazi-like callousness toward disabled prisoners of war? one could imagine him saying. Instead, Democrats — even as they spent part of the week crassly celebrating, with news of Schiavo’s autopsy report in hand, the human rights abuse of euthanasia against the disabled — are in a moral lather over the paucity of proper air conditioning terrorists receive at Guantanamo Bay.

Jewish World Review Stewart Ain

In aftermath of end-of-life controversy, Queens judge cites state and Jewish law in case of 86-year-old woman

Terri Schiavo might still be alive had she been in a hospice in New York State rather than Florida.

A Queens Supreme Court justice, citing state and Orthodox Jewish law, ruled last week that a feeding tube is not medicine and must be inserted into a patient who cannot swallow unless the patient had provided explicit instructions to the contrary.

Schiavo’s husband, Michael, had the feeding tube removed from his wife because he said she would not have wanted to be kept alive by a tube. Terri Schiavo did not have a living will or health-care proxy. She died March 31, 13 days after the tube was removed.

Judge Martin Ritholtz rendered his opinion in a case involving Lee Kahan, 86, an Orthodox Jewish woman.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — A Catholic priest who prayed with Terri Schiavo and the Schindler family shortly before her death criticized Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean for saying his party will use the battle over Terri against Republicans in upcoming elections.

“We’re going to use Terri Schiavo later on,” Dean told those at a weekend political dinner in Hollywood. “This is going to be an issue in 2006, and it’s going to be an issue in 2008,” Dean said. “Because we’re going to have an ad with a picture of Tom DeLay saying, ‘Do you want this guy to decide whether you die or not? Or is that going to be up to your loved ones?”

According to an Associated Press account of the dinner, Dean added, “The issue is: Are we going to live in a theocracy where the highest powers tell us what to do? Or are we going to be allowed to consult our own high powers when we make very difficult decisions?’”
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The Empire Journal
Zogby Poll Shows Americans Favored Terri’s Survival

According to polls published by the mainstream media, particularly one by ABC News, it was indicated that most Americans favored the removal of the nutrition and hydration of Terri Schindler-Schiavo, the 41-year-old disabled woman who died of starvation and thirst March 31 in a court-ordered death in Florida.

But the polls by ABC and Time were based on the disinformation campaign engaged in by the mainstream media in the case. They didn’t tell the public that Terri Schiavo wasn’t vegetative, that she wasn’t in a coma, that she wasn’t terminal. They didn’t tell the public about Michael Schiavo’s adulterous affair and that the order to end her life was based on the self-serving hearsay testimony of Michael Schiavo who had a lot to gain by Terri’s death. In the opinion of many, the mainstream media is as responsible for the death of Terri Schiavo as Judge George W. Greer, Michael Schiavo and his attorney, George Felos.

Contact: Dane Rose of the National Clergy Council, 202-546-8329 ext. 106

WASHINGTON, April 7 /Christian Wire Service/ — The National Clergy council, representing thousands of church leaders from Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox and Protestant traditions, applauds one of its own executive council members, Fr. Frank Pavone of Priests for Life, who has been “frank” in talking publicly about the atrocious killing of Terri Schiavo.

“Fr. Frank has called this for what it is, murder,” said the Reverend Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council and a minister and past board member of the Evangelical Church Alliance. “Terri Schiavo was not dying. She was simply being fed by others, in the same way an infant or even someone with the flu might be assisted by others. Terri was starved and dehydrated to death. No matter what the courts want to call this, in moral and ethical language it is the deliberate taking of innocent human life and that is murder.”

The National Clergy Council is working with congressional and state legislative leaders for judicial reform and the future impeachment of judges that act in flagrant disregard of constitutionally protected rights, including the unalienable right to life.

TownHall.com John Leo

The behavior of conservatives. Uneven and sometimes awful, with lots of vituperation and extreme charges. (Jeb Bush does not remind me of Pontius Pilate; I don’t think it’s fair to circulate rumors that Michael Schiavo was a wife-beater.) Worse were the revolutionary suggestions that the courts be ignored or defied, perhaps by sending in the National Guard to reconnect the tube. This is “by any means necessary” rhetoric of the radical left, this time let loose by angry conservatives. Where does this rhetoric lead?

The behavior of liberals. Mystifying. While conservative opinion was severely splintered, liberal opinion seemed monolithic: Let her die.

Human Events Online Linda Chavez

As Terri Schiavo lay dying, her organs slowly mummifying from the effects of prolonged, court-ordered dehydration and starvation, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal from her parents that might have saved her life. Her parents argued that Schiavo’s right to due process under the law had been denied, a claim summarily rejected — without even the pretense of a full hearing — by a District Court and upheld by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Less than one week later, however, the Supreme Court sat in rapt attention as attorneys argued a very different life and death case, this one involving a convicted rapist and murderer whose case found its way to the high court because he is a non-citizen, and who, it is alleged, had been denied full and adequate access to diplomats from his home country when he was criminally charged.
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Human Events Online Sherry and Steven Eros Mar 31, 2005

Over 2000 years ago the Athenians condemned and executed the philosopher Socrates and the Romans tortured and murdered Jesus Christ. We tend to dismiss the mindless cruelty and barbarity of these acts, this snuffing-out of the lives of two of the greatest benefactors of mankind, as quite understandable, even if lamentable, given the assumption that ancient societies were unfamiliar with the refinements of modern liberal democracy, limited representative government, checks and balances, minority rights and the like. Such travesties of justice could never occur in our modern, highly evolved age–certainly not in America. Cold-blooded court-sanctioned murder of innocents, not to mention the noblest and best of our fellow citizens, is unthinkable here.

What happened in ancient Athens and Jerusalem could never be replicated under our system of laws, in our enlightened age, with a Bill of Rights, standards of proof, jury trials and all the other available protections of individual rights. Compassionate Americans would never stand for their government yanking perfectly innocent citizens off the streets, from their workplaces or out of their homes without due process of law..
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Good article for those confused about body/soul dualism.
After Terri Schiavo’s death, questions remain.

Wall Street Journal DAVID B. HART Friday, April 1, 2005

Terri Schiavo has now died, but of course the controversy surrounding her last days will persist indefinitely. Most of the issues raised as she was dying were legal and moral; but at the margins of the storm, questions of a more “metaphysical” nature were occasionally raised in public. For instance, I heard three people on the radio last week speculating on the whereabouts of her “soul.”

One opined that where consciousness has sunk below a certain minimally responsive level, the soul has already departed the body; the other two thought that the soul remains, but as a dormant prisoner of the ruined flesh, awaiting release. Their arguments, being intuitive, were of little interest. What caught my attention was the unreflective dualism to which all three clearly subscribed: The soul, they assumed, is a kind of magical essence haunting the body, a ghost in a machine.

This is in fact a peculiarly modern view of the matter, not much older than the 17th-century philosophy of Descartes. While it is now the model to which most of us habitually revert when talking about the soul–whether we believe in such things or not–it has scant basis in either Christian or Jewish tradition.

The “living soul” of Scripture is the whole corporeal and spiritual totality of a person whom the breath of God has wakened to life. Thomas Aquinas, interpreting centuries of Christian and pagan metaphysics, defined the immortal soul as the “form of the body,” the vital power animating, pervading, shaping an individual from the moment of conception, drawing all the energies of life into a unity.

WorldNetDaily.com

On Good Friday, as Terri Schiavo lay dying of thirst in Woodside Hospice, Gabriel Keys took her a cup of water. Gabriel was arrested, handcuffed and taken away.

Apparently, no one taught Gabriel that you do not disobey a judge’s order, even to bring water to someone dying of thirst. As he is 10 years old, he is probably not yet conversant with the new morality, where a corporal work of mercy can be a crime. Perhaps his parents filled his mind with such subversive texts as, “Whoever shall give to drink to one of these little ones, a cup of cold water” shall not lose eternal life.

For Terri Schiavo will not have died a natural death. She will have been put to death by the state. The coroner’s report should read: This was a state-sanctioned killing of a woman because she was brain-damaged, and the method of execution was by starvation and denial of water. These are methods most of us would protest if imposed on the Beltway snipers.

Numbers change when proper questions are asked.

Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) — Polls leading up to the death of Terri Schiavo made it appear Americans had formed a consensus in favor of ending her life. However, a new Zogby poll with fairer questions shows the nation clearly supporting Terri and her parents and wanting to protect the lives of other disabled patients.

The Zogby poll found that, if a person becomes incapacitated and hasn ot expressed their preference for medical treatment, as in Terri’s case, 43 percent say “the law presume that the person wants to live,
even if the person is receiving food and water through a tube” while just 30 percent disagree.
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National Review Online

There was an honest, forthright case for ending the life of Terri Schiavo. It was that her life no longer had any value, for herself or others, and that ending it — the quicker the better — would spare everyone misery. We disagree with that view, holding it wiser to stick with the Judeo-Christian tradition on the sanctity of innocent life. But the people who made this case deserve some credit for straightforwardness.

But while the public may have agreed with the removal of Schiavo’s feeding and hydration tube, apparently there are limits to the public’s willingness to tolerate euthanasia — and apparently its defenders recognized these limits. So we saw euphemism after euphemism deployed to cloud the issues.

Perhaps chief among these was the fiction that we were “letting her die.” On March 18, Schiavo was in no medical danger of death. She was profoundly brain-damaged (although just how profoundly remains unknown), but she was not in a coma or on a respirator. She was not being kept alive by artificial means, any more than small children are kept alive by artificial means when their parents feed them. Her body was functioning, there is some reason to believe she was minimally conscious, and she was responsive to stimuli (it’s been reported she was actually being administered pain medication). She had devoted parents and siblings who were willing to care for her. She could easily have gone on in these conditions for many years. She was not close to dying. For death to arrive, she would have to be killed.

Carol Glatz Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Whoever stands idly by without trying to prevent the death of Terri Schindler Schiavo becomes an accomplice to murder, said Cardinal Renato Martino, head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

The death of the severely brain-damaged woman “would represent a homicide in which it is impossible to idly stand by without becoming accomplices,” he said in a March 31 interview with Vatican Radio.

Schiavo died March 31, nearly two weeks after her feeding tube was removed.
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