March 23, 2005
No ice chips for you!
St. Francis Catholic worker Lana Jacobs is arrested for trespassing after attempting to take a bottle of water into the Woodside Hospice for Terri Schiavo.
Photo: Reuters
Lets just say that you don't think that it is suspicious that Michael Schiavo is so passionate about having his disabled wife killed....
Or perhaps that it is odd that he has a common law wife and two children by this wife and yet will not divorce Terri whose own parents are willing to take on all the costs and time of caring for her.
Or even maybe that Michael won a medical malpractice law suit on Terri's behalf and had promised to use the money for her rehabilitation and then has since then ordered the nurses not to do any rehab, and has used that money to pay for litigation to have her feeding tube removed. And that it didn't come out until after this suit was won that Terri had supposedly said (according to Michael the benefactor if she dies) that she didn't want to be kept alive by artificial means.
Or how about an expert who kept saying that it would be cruel for the poor woman if we forced her to undergo surgery to reinsert the port and feeding tube. Yet this same person was saying that the reason that it is ok for her to have the tube removed is that she is in a “persistent vegetative state” that her laughter and words are random spasms. (Can you really have it both ways? Can it be cruel to perform minor surgery and yet NOT cruel to dehydrate to death?)
Lets just say you don't buy into any of that. Lets go to the basic fact that there is a woman in a nursing home right now, who had her feeding tube removed. Here she is dehydrating and starving to death, and the care-givers have been ORDERED not to give her any ice chips or water.
She breaths on her own, her heart beats on its own. She is not on life support.
It is inhumane. You'd be put in jail for doing that to a baby, (even mentally disabled baby). It is illegal to do that to a dog. To a man who has been sentenced to death, it is still inhumane.
I'm just so disappointed that it is possible in this country for something that horrible to happen legally.
There is still hope in the courts, I guess, but I think that everyone is fairly disillusioned with the judges of this country. And it won't necessarily solve the problem for the next person who's guardian finds them problematic. The Florida legislature is trying to pass a bill, however that says that if there is nothing written stating otherwise, then the assumption is towards life.
Let us pray....
Posted by HFT Nica at March 23, 2005 10:24 AM | TrackBackSo ... one might assume that he refuses to divorce her because of a death benefit he would recieve as a husband. Ummm, sounds like a murder mystery to me.