"Terri Schiavo has a right to die in peace," asserts her husband's lawyer.
"I would not want to live like that and I don’t mean just persistent vegetative state, I mean totally dependent on someone else for my care," writes Mind of Mog. We agree, totally, even as we intimately know and are in awe of persons of faith who would disagree with us:
And I have advance directives to protect my rights. No husband to violate them either or as in Terri’s case eager to kill her (think there’s money involved), just a child who, if the money isn’t flowing in her direction, would be unlikely to oppose it. No parents alive either to oppose it. I am scott free . . . ex-husband . . . doesn't care.
The moral of this story, have advance directives. Hospitals always ask and if you don’t have one, they have people that will help you with it. That’s how I got mine. Doesn’t cost anything either.
As for Terri Shiavo's plight being used now as a political football, that is obscene and despicable. The sight and sound of Tom Delay asserting he was trying to "save" Terri Schiavo because that was "what the American people want" left us gasping for air. As we blogged recently:
Our understanding is that these difficult last rites are usually worked out quietly among doctors, patients and families, unnoticed by the lawyers, within hospital walls. Something like that happened with us when we finally let our beloved mother go.
When the lawyers swoop in, things get ugly. Or is it when things get ugly, the lawyers swoop in? Either way, it is unseemly for such intimate sorrow to be held up to the TV camera's eye.
"Terri Schiavo has a right to die in peace," her husband's lawyer is saying live on FOXNews, chastising the Congress -- and naming names, including Hillary and other Democrats who didn't try to stop Republican efforts to have the feeding tube reinserted into the helpless woman after it had been removed, by court order, this afternoon -- for trying to intimidate Schiavo's husband and "walking over her body for their political deals."
Update: Mort Kondracke, who recently lost his wife after a long, long, long time of sorrow as she faded away over the years with Parkinson's, says just let her go. Fellow FOXNews commentator Fred Barnes doesn't have a clue. Maybe you have to have been there to get it, or maybe it's just a matter of heredity (you heard the one yesterday about how religiosity is in the genes?).
If that was my daughter I would have wanted her to stay alive. Her parents are willing to care for her, so why not let them? It's no skin off my back. Her husband is pond scum for not allowing her parents to have her. Gotta love how people are sitting on their fat asses telling the parents their daughter has no right to live.
Posted by: Trapezium | March 18, 2005 at 06:19 PM
I agree. Let the family decide. Keep the politicians out of it.
Posted by: Sissy Willis | March 18, 2005 at 07:42 PM
"Just let her go" That means the're willing to let her starve to death from lack of food and water. That would be a horrible way to die. It doesn't seem very loving to me.
Posted by: Stephen Lalley | March 18, 2005 at 07:45 PM
We don't know where she's at now. I can't stand that everyone under the sun is deciding to cast her fate in terms of his or her own politics. That's why I say just step back and let the families decide.
Posted by: Sissy Willis | March 18, 2005 at 07:53 PM