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Did Terri Schiavo's parents ever try to get guardianship?


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quote:
Originally posted by Mr-P Mosh:

More than 80% of Americans agree with you. On this site we sometimes get the more extreme religious viewpoint because some folks have moved on from TWI to another cult without changing behavior or their easily-victimized mind. Very few people would want their corpse to be kept alive unnaturally, very few would want to interfere with the wishes of a wife based upon the word of a husband who has shown dedication to her, and very few believe that the federal government has any business interfering with private family business.

Mr. P-Mosh, thems strong words, son!

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quote:
Originally posted by Long Gone:

It would be nice if people could state their opinions without others spouting off about "twi mindsets" or "waybrain."

Thank you very much, Long Gone, you got what I was trying to say.

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quote:
Originally posted by sharon:

Ms. Schiavo has received help from the state for the past two years.

from the internet...

so someone else has been paying for the other 13 yrs..

mark your article 80,000x 13 years=1,040,000.00

ok i retract catholic church statement in was rude....

That's why I have never said that he was in it for money from the malpractice suit. I have always said that, other than the basic human tragedy involved, that the only real problem here is that Michael Schiavo may (not absolutely, but may) have a conflict of interest that may impact his ability to act as a proxy for his wife. If that issue could be properly adjudicated (and there is no provision of Florida law to allow that kind of adjudication), then the issue could be solved. Doesn't mean I'd like it, but then it would fall into the "NONE OF MY BUSINESS" category.

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Another very interesting, and honest, article (titled 'Schiavo: case closed (Keith Olbermann)') about this situation (and I'll be willing to wager one you won't see on Faux :-)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6210240/

Frankly, I'm more and more siding with Micheal Schiavo, the more crap I hear coming from the right-to-lifer side.

Here's the Daily Show's take on the matter, and I think it shows the level of ridiculousness that this thing has gone to:

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/03/25.html#a2137

icon_rolleyes.gif:rolleyes:-->

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Oh, gee, I don't know. Michael Schiavo, the only witness to Terri Schiavo's collapse where she becomes brain-damaged and initially not too much in the matter of tests are taken as they tried to revive her then check on her brain.

Let's see, the guy has denied MRIs and PET Scans to really study her brain, denied physical, occupational and speech therapyover the years that would have aided her in at least being able to move around and communicate somewhat other than the words she can say which are "Mommy" and "Paaiii.." (Pain). Then the guy wanted no autopsy at first, which might bring about cause to her problem or possible abuse, a cremation so that the evidence is almost all gone, and burial in his own family plot so that in order to dig her up again they have to get his permission.

This is something only the Mafia does in this order. That is, no witnesses to a hit, finish them off, hide the body and there are no autopsys leading to clues to the crime and therefore the perpretrator.

The autopsy is being allowed only because of the heat on Schiavo. If he did in fact inject her with anything then push her down stairs (she has an xray record of over 13 broken bones, only a few of which could have happened, if they did, during care (broken ribs can happen during CPR). The broken hip and broken leg, the fractured skull still remain a mystery unless she passed out on a large flight of stairs and hit a lot of objects during her fall. It's possible I suppose.

She is not yet brain dead and expresses herself through smiling at her parents, frowning at Michael Schiavo, and leaning up slightly when the doctor enters the room. She says only a few words. But she listens to music and loves affection.

There was no living will. They are taking the word of a husband who has already has another women and two children by her. Despite medical personnel outnumbering Michael Schiavo's team in testimony in favor of Terri and against Michael, the activist judges have decided they would rather kill her and use procedure to do it.

There is no law allowing for her death because a guardian says so if she is able to eat and is not brain dead and not aged and on a respirator. She is simply a disabled person that needs help and with therapy could eat by swallowing food. She needs a feeding tube only because her husband won't allow any treatment and has vetoed it for years.

I believe Michael Schiavo has motive to have her killed and has nothing to do with her last wishes. He even admitted to a nurse long ago that he and Terri never discussed something like this. The nurse's testimony was ignored.

The judiciary is certainly guilty of being complicite in an act of murder. I don't let a black robe be any kind of ultimate authority. Look at priests today.

The biggest shame to me though, is President George W. Bush. He absolutely does have the power and authority to rescue this woman and there is nothing anyone could do about it. His opponents couldn't get enough votes for impeachment even if he did break a law. He has done nothing other than verbally oppose the court-ordered death and sign a bill into law only allowing the federal courts to look at it. And even though I despised Bill Clinton, I truly think that if he believed that she should be rescued, he would in fact use his power to do that. I believe George W. wimped out on this although I find few to agree with me on this. I voted for him. I guess I got what I asked for and had it coming, watching this woman starve to death.

If people want to assume thet Terri Schiavo wanted to die, fine. Let them prove it. But they can't assume it and take action on that assumption based on hearsay testimony of a husband who was not all that close to her according to relatives. Nothing in writing. Only one guy, and he has been contradicted. And one witness against Michael Schiavo scared off and refusing to testify against him after promising she would. It was an ex-girlfriend of his. Not sure if this "girlfriend" was during his marriage to Terri or not.

It may really be true she wants to live, just as she is, enjoying her family's attention.

If this is so, the benefit of the doubt should be afforded for the one who cannot speak or plead for her life in her own behalf.

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For the love of Pete, guy. Where did you get your information? You mean you have heard nothing about the eating disorder that caused her heart to stop? How come there was nothing in the news about any broken bones, even on Faux-- err Fox? And spare me the 'media is tightly controlled by liberals' line please. Besides, there is nothing that the media would gain by lying about Terri's situation. Sources please?

Oh, and realize that Micheal 'took up' with his common law wife *after* Terri went comatose. Sorry, but there is way too many holes in the 'Micheal is such a bad man' song-and-dance to have any leaning against his account of what Terri wanted.

"The judiciary is certainly guilty of being complicite in an act of murder."

Gee, I thought that they are avoiding being the 'activist judges' that conservatives usually whine about? Plus they are ruling according to the law.

I do find it interesting that through all the howling by the religious right, they avoid like the plague the possibility that Terri just might not want to live in this condition. Having the right to decide one's death in situations like this has never been viewed favorably by these people.

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from a friend who is a nurse....

quote:
I am following this issue closely, as I have dealt with it personally so many times during my career.... You wouldn't believe how many patients suffer the same fate. It is just that this Terri Schiavo case has always been highly publicized. So public awareness is now incredible about this.

I once lost a job over this issue. As Director of Nursing of Hillhaven 39th Street in Sacramento, back in 1986, I was on call one weekend. A patient pulled out her feeding tube. The family was also very divided on the issue of keeping her alive, and I was already very aware of their opposing positions and of this patient's health status. I decided to ask a doctor for an order to put an IV in, to get her hydration for the weekend anyway, and then let the administrator and others deal with it for the long-term come Monday..... The doctor gave me the order I wanted and I started her IV. I reasoned that at least she would be kept hydrated and comfortable for the weekend, and what harm could that do?

Well, needless-to-say, when Monday came around, the one side of the family wanted to crucify me and complained bitterly to the administrator. This patient was paying privately so appeasing the family meant $$$ for the facility..... Guess who the administrator sided with? I wrote volumes of documentation explaining the medical rationales for my decision, what fluids would and wouldn't do for the patient in 2 days, etc, but to no avail.

Very shortly after that, the administrator told me that since we didn't see eye to eye on important issues, namely this right-to-live issue, that it would be better for me to work elsewhere. I could see this coming and had already walked across the street to Mercy General, where I was immediately hired as a night supervisor, anyway. So I was prepared, and gave the administrator a letter with a 2-week notice; we agreed to part friends who agreed to disagree.

I still remember that patient's name, and I kept my notes for many years after this happened, expecting to hear more about it as time went on. I never did, though. And I don't even know when she died eventually..... But she is just the example that comes to mind. There have been so many of these situations.....

Feeding tubes are not considered "life support" -- just "paliative/supportive care measures." Many patients can be given these feedings and then will die of other health events over the course of time. That is considered a "natural death." I guess after 15 years, in Terri's case, her estranged husband couldn't wait any longer for a natural death to occur. The fact that Terri didn't get pneumonia or horrible bedsores that could have led to an overwhelming infection, or some other complication from being bedbound is truly amazing, and indicates that she did receive good medical/nursing care. Terri obviously wanted to live or her own stamina would have prevented her from living this long, if you ask me.

I do think she is severely brain damaged. But since when is that a crime to keep someone who is brain damaged alive? I don't believe for a second that she ever said don't give me a feeding tube if I become incapacitated!

I sure wish the Schindlers could win this fight, to help all the others patients like Terri who don't get this amount of exposure to their own, similar fights.

I think it's interesting that it is illegal to starve an animal...

Praying still,

Kit

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quote:
Originally posted by Kit Sober (quoting her friend):

Feeding tubes are not considered "life support" -- just "paliative/supportive care measures."

quote:
Florida Statutes:

765.101(10) "Life-prolonging procedure" means any medical procedure, treatment, or intervention, including artificially provided sustenance and hydration…

765.102(5) For purposes of this chapter:

(a) Palliative care is the comprehensive management of the physical, psychological, social, spiritual, and existential needs of patients. Palliative care is especially suited to the care of persons who have incurable, progressive illnesses.

(b) Palliative care must include:

3. Assurance that preferences for withholding and withdrawing life-sustaining interventions will be honored.

Florida law is not unusual. Neither is the sort of death Terri Schiavo is experiencing (death by dehydration, not starvation). At this moment, probably hundreds of people are dying in the same way, in hospitals, nursing homes, and hospices across the country. Many thousands have during the course of the legal battles over her case.
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Another prayerful statement from Frangipane:

quote:
The following message is from Scotsman.com. It gives one perspective coming from Scotland that is both passionate and convicting. We are sending this article in hopes of awakening added prayer, not only for Terri Schiavo and her family, but for the United States. We agree with the headline: It is time for a moral revolution!

Francis Frangipane

Time for a Moral Revolution

Abortion 'on demand' and the scandalous Schiavo case have resonance in the week we celebrate the triumph of life over death

by GERALD WARNER

EASTER is a celebration of the triumph of life over death and of right over wrong. So it is peculiarly poignant that issues of life and death should be dominating the news this Easter, most dramatically so in the United States.

Last week, before the eyes of the whole world, the nation that has pledged to export its values to the rest of the globe set about starving and dehydrating one of its citizens to death. That it did so against the wishes of the president, Congress and the people only added to the horror of the situation. If Terri Schiavo is still alive by the time you read this and there has been no new intervention, it will be her ninth day deprived even of water.

The Schiavo case has been hugely misrepresented in the media, not least by the BBC, which has reported it under a 'Right to Die' caption. It is not about the right to die: it is about the right to kill. The weasel term 'persistent vegetative state' has been attached to Mrs Schiavo, although her husband has refused to have her tested to establish her clinical status. Terri Schiavo is not a vegetable; she is not on a life-support machine; she does not have any tubes attached to her body. She has received visitors, out of bed and fully dressed. Her feeding tube was not "removed", since it had never been a permanent attachment: doctors, constrained by court order, stopped connecting it to her at mealtimes.

The Schiavo family has put some startling videos on the internet which show Mrs Schiavo making eye contact with her mother, smiling and visibly reacting to her. There is strong evidence she is not in a so-called persistent vegetative state. Dr William Hammesfahr, a Nobel Prize-nominated neurologist who has an international reputation for treating brain-injured patients, said earlier this month: "We, and others I know, have treated many patients worse than Terri and have seen them regain independence and dignity."

Hammesfahr was not speaking speculatively, as his further remarks show: "There are many approaches that would help Terri Schiavo. I know, because I had the opportunity to personally examine her, her medical records, and her X-rays."

Yet Mrs Schiavo's medical records show she did not receive any rehabilitative therapy after 1993. Michael Schiavo, her husband, not only failed to procure such therapy but in 1993 tried to have antibiotics withheld from his wife when she was suffering from an infection; he was overruled by staff at the nursing home.

Schiavo, who has entered into a relationship with another woman by whom he has fathered two children, is the instigator of the move to end his wife's life, despite the opposition of her parents and siblings. Where are the feminists in this fight for a woman's life? What credibility does the "justice" system of the US retain when Judge George Greer presumes to make a clinical judgment that overrules Hammesfahr and hands down a death sentence on an innocent woman?

What must it be like to watch, helplessly, while food and water are denied you and you start to die by inches? If they did it to a laboratory rat, outraged activists would storm the building. Morality aside, this is being done on the authority of juju medical science. Some years ago, the British Medical Journal reported a study by clinicians of 40 patients referred to as being in a vegetative state; 43% were judged to have been misdiagnosed, although seven had been in this supposed state for more than a year and three of them for over four years.

The Schiavo case must provoke a political explosion in America. The crisis coincides with a mood of reappraisal in this country regarding issues of life and death, with abortion and sex selection of embryos by IVF parents registering on the political radar. The arrogance of politicians was epitomised by Tony Blair, who is conscientiously opposed to abortion but has voted 28 times to extend it - on four occasions up to full term. He claims he does not wish to impose his own beliefs on the public: it is a pity he did not exercise the same self-denying ordinance over WMD and war in Iraq.

Now he tells us abortion should not be an election issue. Unhappily for the Great Charlatan, it is the voters who will decide what is an election issue. If some feel it is more important to review the fact that almost seven million babies have been aborted in Britain since 1967, rather than to preview the putative public spending figures for 2012, that reflects the more principled priorities of electors than politicians.

Whether there is a genuine moral revolution under way is a different question. The reality is we now have abortion on demand: one pregnancy in four ends in this way. Reducing the legal time limit from 24 to 20 weeks is patently a reaction to the vivid images of babies in the womb brought to us by advancing science. Yet there is no intrinsic difference between an infant in the 140th day of its life and the 141st: gestation is a seamless progress, only conception and birth are major transitions.

If it is only squeamishness over the obvious destruction of a child that is disturbing the public, displacement of surgical by chemical abortion will eventually anaesthetise opinion. The Christian stance is well known. Yet abortion presents a challenge to the humanist conscience. Why is it assumed that non-believers should be pro-abortion? Should not those who have no belief in an afterlife value this life all the more?

A similar concern is destruction of human embryos, intrinsic to IVF. It is outrageous that the most crucial decisions made have been relegated to a quango, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, with Parliament recusing itself from responsibility since 1990. The traffic lights on the road to perdition are permanently at green: not only is human cloning now legal, but the latest obscenity canvassed last week is human/animal cross mutation.

"I thirst" was among the last words on the Cross. A human being dying of dehydration in Holy Week has an apocalyptic resonance. This Easter we must pledge ourselves to moral regeneration, reasserting our human dignity and the inviolability of all innocent life.

I still maintain that the life of a person should be more protected than the life of a dog. (It's a crime to starve a dog but it is legally and court-sanctioned to starve Terri Schiavo.)

The shutteth up the bowels of compassion of I John 3:17 is "If you see some brother or sister in need and have the means to do something about it but turn a cold shoulder and do nothing, what happens to God’s love? It disappears. And you made it disappear" in The Message translation.

Hardening of the spiritual arteries is not only a consequence of cult-mindset but also all intellectual arrogance.

Terri Schiavo is a woman who is being publicly tortured under the approval of our entire legal community.

I am so sorry and ashamed of this for our country which, in the past, has been able to say we are the home of the brave and the land of the free.

Kit Sober

"this is my story and I'm sticking to it."

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In Genesis 1:23

quote:
23And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

24Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

25And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

Three times in the Bible it is mentioned how children leave their parents and become joined to each other.

If we truly believe in the one flesh relationship, we must believe that what Michael Schiavo did concerning Terri, he did to himself. Not just since the feeding tube was removed, but for thw entirety of their relationship.

If they two had become one flesh, Michael Schiavo's rights superceded those of Terri's parents. He, as her husband, had every right to be alone with Terri as she took her last breath.

It was God who said, "leave" father and mother. It is Satan who places us in positions where the totality of our choices are between evils. At that point, our righteous duty is to do our best to choose the lesser of the evils.

We argue that Terri, as a human has the right to live. Of course she did. We argue that she was, in fact "aware" in what they've called a persistent vegetative state. She's aware, therefore jam a tub down her throat and feed her to keep her alive, don't allow her to starve and die a horrible death.

Is not once being alive, mobile and vital, then being confined to live in a shell of a body which has lost virtually all of its capabilities except awareness, condemning her to a horrible life?

Personally, I recently lost my ability to walk without the aid of crutches due to a severe knee injury. That relatively small loss of vitality, and the subsequent four months of rehabilitating the knee to where its now at approx. 75% capacity, was and is "a living hell for me."

By comparison, Terri Schiavo's state, in my opinion, to ME would be a fate WORSE than death. I feel I would welcome the sureity of sliding into certain death, knowing that what awaited me at the end of that most horrible journey would be my new body and the sound of the trumpet of God calling me to to "rise first" and be with the Lord.

Yes. I have children, 5 to be exact. Well add in the two ex-stepdaughters, if you must. I know the intense desire a parent has to outlive their children, the intense desire to keep them ALL from harm of any kind - - I live with it daily. I live that side of the argument. I have THREE daughters, God forbid the day they bring a jerk of a guy before me and ask me to give them to HIM.

Were it me, I'd feel I died the moment I became a "vegetable." Having lost both of my parents, I saw something similar in both of them at their time of passing from this life. God did something personal and private with them both that they knew. I can't say what it was, I can only say that they were not alone, He God was there with them in a way that I will never really know until He is with me in the same way.

My Mom was in a state similar to Terri Schiavo prior to dying from lung cancer. Long after the doctors said she was "unaware," she was very aware. Unable to communicate, but she was aware. God prepared her to leave and when the time came, she was ready.

We who are not in the shoes of the dying have no right to presume anything for them. Regardless of our personal beleif system. God IS there for us in ways that are too high for us. The ONLY person with any right to say anything for Terri was her husband, jerk or not.

Now her parents are fighting over her body. They want to determine how she is buried, rather than cremated.

How easy would it have been for Michael Schiavo to have just disappeared? Guys do it every day. This is a definite "no win" for him.

My personal opinion is that we must believe that God is who HE says he is. This life IS insignificant in comparison to eternity.

God took care of Terri, God rest her soul.

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(((((((HCW)))))))

I'm sorry about your knee.

This forum proves that there are a lot of caring people with equally intense beliefs and ideas and I believe that we are all right, on some level (well, I don't believe you should still act as someone's spouse once you've got another one--sorry I can't give that one credence). But, like it or not, we all feel strongly about the case in one way or another.

And, when all else fails, why can't we be as caring for loved ones as we are with criminals and animals? I know a lot of people will disagree with me on that one.

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