While your later comments indicate a change of heart, I did want to answer this. Sure, they were going to comment about the autopsy. However, there was absolutely no need to continue the accusations against Michael for what happened in 1990. Given that they chose to do so, suggested to me that they’d never let him live in peace. but again, all you have is well, nothing, right? Except that gosh darn they should let it go 'cause what’s the point now. It should be painfully obvious by now that these people have no “what’s the point now”. There is apparently no limit to either their delusions nor their venom. They get no pass from me. Evil scum, they are. Terri deserved better than them.
I’m not asking for flames here,I am curious though. If she wasn’t about to die a certain death on her own, and she expired from lack of nutrient and water (it seems),how is that not murder? Or was she considered technically dead already?
Her brain no longer worked. It showed no electrical activity. Her heart and lungs still worked because her brain stem still functioned, but the part of her that made her an “alive human” wasn’t there anymore. So she was deas already.
Oy! This was all hashed out, at stupendous length, in the threads that erupted during the battles over removing the feeding tubes. If you run a search in GD and the Pit you’ll find the loooooooong threads discussing it, where DoctorJ and a goodly number of other Dopers explain precisely why it wasn’t murder, or inhumance to remove hydrationb and nutrition, and a whole lotta other info.
No offense was intended; I’m sorry. I’ve heard it called murder,heck, I’ve read it called a ritual sacrifice (it took 13 days,notice?) :rolleyes:
well, why it wasn’t legally murder is that a person has a right to refuse medical treatment. Doctor wants to do chemo on me and I refuse, my death is not ruled a suicide. And, the legal guardian/next of kin has the right under law to make health care decisions. Parent do for kids all the time.
when the patient is an adult and unable to communicate their wishes, then you refer to things like living wills (if they have one), and barring that, generally, the next of kin makes the decision. IN this case, Michael was the next of kin. Her parents disagreed w/his decision, and went to court scads of times to have him removed as next o kin, so they could make the decision.
the courts at length listened to testimony from the Schiavo’s, the Schindlers, friends, doctors etc. The courts universally ruled that:
- while Terri had not made up a living will, she had made several comments to various people (including but not only Michael) that she wouldn’t want to be kept alive by artificial means (paraphrased).
- That there was no legal reason to deny Michaels’ right to make that decision.
- That the parents, while it was obvious they cared for their daughter, did not seem to have Terri’s best interests at heart (the whole chop off her limbs if need be to save the torso thing).
therefore - not murder in the eyes of the law.
we all agree it would have been much clearer had Terri had a living will or something like that but keep in mind she was a very young woman at the time with no particular reason to believe she’d end up like she did. as a parenthetical comment, my father who was 82 and in very poor health when he passed, also did not have any written living will. and he’d been fighting cancer for a decade. So I never put too much stock in the ‘if she’d wanted one, she would have done so’.
I’m going to add my 2 cents. To me this autopsy report doesn’t mean a damn thing. What’s bothered me is that a lot of the argument has been weather she was in a Persistant vegitative state, or a Mildly(minimaly) conscious state. The parents,(selfish assholes if you ask me), were claiming that she is somewhat conscious so she should live, Bullshit!! PVS or MCS I wouldn’t want to live, and I’m sure whatever MS and TS said to each other, I’m sure the quote “if I’m ever a vegetable…” also included whatever a MCS is.
Just thinking about it makes me sick. If it was me, laying in that hospital room, I’d never taste another beer again, I’d never eat another fat greasy green chile cheese burger, I’d never be able to scratch my nuts again, I’d never sit down and take a nice big dump again(except in a diaper, and if thats your thing, there would be no adventure in it, same goo pumped into my stomach vs ‘wow I shouldn’t have eaten those jalapenos’), never get to cut my toenails, and go ‘hey that smells funny’, add in all the romantic crap of walking on the beach, sand between the toes etc…
Thats just the little stuff, imagine that you can’t feed yourself, you can’t walk, you can’t stand, you can’t even control your limbs. You can’t communicate except with a ‘ugggh’ or ‘aaaghh’. If I was conscious inside that would be an absolute fucking living hell, all I would want to do is die.
What the parents did is just so fucking cruel. First allowing and even wanting their daugher to live like that, I’ve put down animals and it sucks, but for people on the “moral high ground” they should know better, life blah blah blah, but that is not life, its watching your own child suffer and the worst part is wanting your own child to continue suffering even if you have to parade them on national TV.
I don’t even want to get into the political side, since that was just the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve seen in a while, the party of small goverernment and less involvement sticking their nose where it doesn’t belong, and imagine which assholes were pushing that?
One more thing that really pissed me off is people saying MS was cheating on his wife. They will say why didn’t he give her over to her parents, I can guarantee most of those people would be the first to crucify him for divorcing a vegetable(or someone in an MCS, same shit) you know, sanctity of marriage and all that. He must have really loved her to put up with all of this bullshit, and still try to carry out her wishes, obviously he loved her, he spent what? seven years trying to rehab her? Life has to go on(maybe someone should have told this to the parents and Sean Hannity). I give him a lot of respect, he wasn’t smearing like the parents where, but then again what can you expect from the religious moral high ground? just a little more hate and intolerance, jesus would have been proud.
I’ll go you one better and say that Terri’s parents did not love her in the end–maybe never.
To deliberately obstruct another adult’s wishes in this way and then to parade her around like a side show exhibit–that is not love.
At first, I was sympathetic to them and understood their grief and devastation–no parent should have to bury a child.
But then, as the months turned into years, and the years into decades–I lost sympathy for them, and began to pity them.
When they got the whackjobs involved aka the GOP–any tender feeling I had for them turned to contempt.
Now I am sick to see such evil. I call it evil. I have too much respect for the mentally ill to lump this couple in with them.
I can easily be mistaken in my opinion, but I wonder if those who judge Michael Schiavo’s second relationship harsly have ever been able to love another person enough to release them emotionally and physically.
I would never want my husband to stop living his life fully because of me. If he enjoyed marriage, what better way to show it than by establishing a marriage again? With any perspective, I would have known that he sacrificed in order to fulfill my wishes. That was enormous love.
What is it with an ownership attitude and someone else’s rules and promises that don’t make good sense anymore? What about doing what makes sense for everyone and keeping the promises that still hold some meaning?
What about celebrating the lives of the two children that exist because of the new union that has been formed? Even though I feel sorrow for Terri’s parents, I am happy for the new life.
eleanorigby, good stuff.
Sorry, I was off having a life. But since I could not continue another moment of my life knowing that <goes back a couple of pages> Mockingbird thinks badly of me, I hereby retract everything. Schiavo is a living saint. Her parents should be tortured to death forthwith. Everyone who’s ever walked into a church should have their vote nullified.
Now everybody’s happy.
:rolleyes:
That seems a bit extreme–not everyone who has walked into a church should have their vote nullified.
I’ll take your post as frustration and sarcasm–can’t say I blame you, but this is a topic where there are many well informed people–sadly, the media and many of our elected reps are not as well informed. In fact, one might call them willfully ignorant and wanting to stir shit, but that’s another thread.
oops-meant to add, thanks, Zoe–and right back atcha!
Go fuck yourself, you hypocritical martyr.
No offense taken. I just figured the folks who went to so much trouble to lay out the facts before might be a wee bit battle-fatigued and reluctant to wade into it again.
If you don’t want to bother searching, there’s a GD thread going on right now, a revival of one that started shortly after Terri Schiavo’s death. Hashes over the issues you’ve brought up, has links to explanations of various aspects, and as an extra added bonus has lekatt as… Well, as lekatt. 
They opposed it so much that there’s all sorts of evidence of their public condemnations and protestations?
If one side is making noise and the other side is quietly sitting on their hands whose fault is it if assumptions are made about a group?
-Joe
Nice deflection, Mehitabel! Didn’t work though. I’m pretty sure the only one buying your act is you, if that.
Sam
Don’t worry, it was just for Mockingbird. Not trying to say anything to anybody else. Thread’s not about me or my feelings about Michael Schiavo. He’s a human being who had to make some very impossible decisions, some of which I’m not too happy about. But so what? I have no idea why this thread was started in the Pit except for us all to vent.
Uhh… I know you haven’t been following the case closely and all that, but she’s not living. She died. That’s the point.
Please, as if I’m the only one to call you on your bullshit.
Well, you’re the only one I can remember. Now why are you obsessing about me?
Besides, from your first post in this thread you started with the whole “culture of life assholes” thing, so I don’t think you’re on the high moral ground either.
Oh well. Looks like I have some more reading to do.