Macfistowannabe
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
The comment made was solely based on an irrelevant poll. If you choose to sign such a thing, that's your own decision.indra said:
MERGED: Terri Schiavo
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indra
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Macfistowannabe said:
But you keep pushing your opinion that NO ONO would EVER choose to die by having nutrition and fluids withheld. That's what I was commenting on. You keep commenting that "she's starving to death," and no one would want that to happen to them, but you choose not to listen to people who challenge that view.
When you continuously do that, do you really expect anyone to give what you post any more consideration?
Macfistowannabe
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
I listen to, and have listened to, the most credible of cases presented. If it's a blog site, I will question it's credibility. If the polls ask if anyone wants to be in Terri's position, I will question those as well. If it's firsthand evidence, I give credit to it. Simply my style.indra said:
Are you insinuating that I've dodged all opposing opinions by ignorance? Because I feel that all I've done is state my stance, defend it, and attentively challenge opposing viewpoints.indra said:
deep
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Future fanatic?
all_i_want
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fanatic for what? 
Macfistowannabe
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Handcuffs. 
deep
Blue Crack Addict
all_i_want said:fanatic for what?
Gabriel Keys (foreground) is arrested by police officers for trespassing in Pinellas Park, Florida, March 23, 2005. The young protester attempted to take a glass of water into the Woodside Hospice for the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo. A federal judge rejected a request from the parents of Schiavo to order her feeding tube reinserted, dealing a blow to attempts by the U.S. Congress and the White House to prolong her life. REUTERS/Carlos Barria
deep
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all_i_want said:fanatic for what?
american jihad
all_i_want
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deep said:
oh ok, poor kid, i guess
Macfistowannabe
Rock n' Roll Doggie Band-aid
Thanks for the info, but I don't consider him that much of a fanatic. How old is he, ten?
nbcrusader
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deep said:
Is this your new slur for Pro-Lifer, Christian or what?
all_i_want
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i dont really see why this is SOO blown out of proportion.. a lot of people die because they can not afford the life-support systems anymore, actually governor bush had signed a bill that legalized pulling the plug on these people, why is no one discussing that but this case is being taken all the way to the congress? selective perception is a bitch 
also, the woman is in a permanent vegetative state, she will not get any better, why do all these people put all the time and effort to keep her suffering? i dont think anyone HERE would like to live in the state she is in, we would all want the plug to be pulled. she was being kept here at her own expense.
also, the woman is in a permanent vegetative state, she will not get any better, why do all these people put all the time and effort to keep her suffering? i dont think anyone HERE would like to live in the state she is in, we would all want the plug to be pulled. she was being kept here at her own expense.
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deep
Blue Crack Addict
nbcrusader said:
I don't believe these protesters are either.
And I think it is wrong to agitate a child to extreem behavior.
BVS
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deep said:
Glass of water? What the hell for?
BonoVoxSupastar said:
So she could choke to death on it.
I make it a point not to post on this board anymore, but I just had to come and note that it's really difficult to read statements about scientific matters made by people who don't understand science on this level.
Terri's cerebral cortex has eroded.
She is no longer with us.
It's grotesque to keep a dead body with a living soul here.
Her parents have said they would contest this even if TERRI herself had a living will specifying she did not want to live this way.
That should tell you something about these poor people's complete and utter inability to let their daughter go.
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
deep said:
By taking a glass of water to Schiavo's room?
deep
Blue Crack Addict
bingo
the kid should be playing baseball or reading a good book
not trying to bust a Police line
behind some phony crap his parents put into his head.
the kid should be playing baseball or reading a good book
not trying to bust a Police line
behind some phony crap his parents put into his head.
all_i_want
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deep said:
do you mean reading THE good book?
nbcrusader
Blue Crack Addict
deep said:
Children are quite capable of compassion on their own, free from political grandstanding.
Perhaps if we could all act this way, free of calculation.
nathan1977
Rock n' Roll Doggie
An interesting article on all of this on Slate.com...
Not Dead at All -- Why Congress was right to stick up for Terri Schiavo.
By Harriet McBryde Johnson
The Terri Schiavo case is hard to write about, hard to think about. Those films are hard to look at. I see that face, maybe smiling, maybe not, and I am reminded of a young woman I knew as a child, lying on a couch, brain-damaged, apparently unresponsive, and deeply beloved—freakishly perhaps but genuinely so—living proof of one family's no-matter-what commitment. I watch nourishment flowing into a slim tube that runs through a neat, round, surgically created orifice in Ms. Schiavo's abdomen, and I'm almost envious. What effortless intake! Due to a congenital neuromuscular disease, I am having trouble swallowing, and it's a constant struggle to get by mouth the calories my skinny body needs. For whatever reason, I'm still trying, but I know a tube is in my future. So, possibly, is speechlessness. That's a scary thought. If I couldn't speak for myself, would I want to die? If I become uncommunicative, a passive object of other people's care, should I hope my brain goes soft and leaves me in peace?
My emotional response is powerful, but at bottom it's not important. It's no more important than anyone else's, not what matters. The things that ought to matter have become obscured in our communal clash of gut reactions. Here are 10 of them:
1. Ms. Schiavo is not terminally ill. She has lived in her current condition for 15 years. This is not about end-of-life decision-making. The question is whether she should be killed by starvation and dehydration.
2. Ms. Schiavo is not dependent on life support. Her lungs, kidneys, heart, and digestive systems work fine. Just as she uses a wheelchair for mobility, she uses a tube for eating and drinking. Feeding Ms. Schiavo is not difficult, painful, or in any way heroic. Feeding tubes are a very simple piece of adaptive equipment, and the fact that Ms. Schiavo eats through a tube should have nothing to do with whether she should live or die.
3. This is not a case about a patient's right to refuse treatment. I don't see eating and drinking as "treatment," but even if they are, everyone agrees that Ms. Schiavo is presently incapable of articulating a decision to refuse treatment. The question is who should make the decision for her, and whether that substitute decision-maker should be authorized to kill her by starvation and dehydration.
4. There is a genuine dispute as to Ms. Schiavo's awareness and consciousness. But if we assume that those who would authorize her death are correct, Ms. Schiavo is completely unaware of her situation and therefore incapable of suffering physically or emotionally. Her death thus can't be justified for relieving her suffering.
5. There is a genuine dispute as to what Ms. Schiavo believed and expressed about life with severe disability before she herself became incapacitated; certainly, she never stated her preferences in an advance directive like a living will. If we assume that Ms. Schiavo is aware and conscious, it is possible that, like most people who live with severe disability for as long as she has, she has abandoned her preconceived fears of the life she is now living. We have no idea whether she wishes to be bound by things she might have said when she was living a very different life. If we assume she is unaware and unconscious, we can't justify her death as her preference. She has no preference.
6. Ms. Schiavo, like all people, incapacitated or not, has a federal constitutional right not to be deprived of her life without due process of law.
7. In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.
8. In other contexts, federal courts are available to make sure state courts respect federally protected rights. This review is critical not only to the parties directly involved, but to the integrity of our legal system. Although review will very often be a futile last-ditch effort—as with most death-penalty habeas petitions—federalism requires that the federal government, not the states, have the last word. When the issue is the scope of a guardian's authority, it is necessary to allow other people, in this case other family members, standing to file a legal challenge.
9. The whole society has a stake in making sure state courts are not tainted by prejudices, myths, and unfounded fears—like the unthinking horror in mainstream society that transforms feeding tubes into fetish objects, emblematic of broader, deeper fears of disability that sometimes slide from fear to disgust and from disgust to hatred. While we should not assume that disability prejudice tainted the Florida courts, we cannot reasonably assume that it did not.
10. Despite the unseemly Palm Sunday pontificating in Congress, the legislation enabling Ms. Schiavo's parents to sue did not take sides in the so-called culture wars. It did not dictate that Ms. Schiavo be fed. It simply created a procedure whereby the federal courts could decide whether Ms. Schiavo's federally protected rights have been violated.
In the Senate, a key supporter of a federal remedy was Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a progressive Democrat and longtime friend of labor and civil rights, including disability rights. Harkin told reporters, "There are a lot of people in the shadows, all over this country, who are incapacitated because of a disability, and many times there is no one to speak for them, and it is hard to determine what their wishes really are or were. So I think there ought to be a broader type of a proceeding that would apply to people in similar circumstances who are incapacitated."
I hope against hope that I will never be one of those people in the shadows, that I will always, one way or another, be able to make my wishes known. I hope that I will not outlive my usefulness or my capacity (at least occasionally) to amuse the people around me. But if it happens otherwise, I hope whoever is appointed to speak for me will be subject to legal constraints. Even if my guardian thinks I'd be better off dead—even if I think so myself—I hope to live and die in a world that recognizes that killing, even of people with the most severe disabilities, is a matter of more than private concern.
Clearly, Congress's Palm Sunday legislation was not the "broader type of proceeding" Harkin and I want. It does not define when and how federal court review will be available to all of those in the shadows, but rather provides a procedure for one case only. To create a general system of review, applicable whenever life-and-death decisions intersect with disability rights, will require a reasoned, informed debate unlike what we've had until now. It will take time. But in the Schiavo case, time is running out.
Harriet McBryde Johnson is a disability-rights lawyer in Charleston, S.C. Her memoir in stories, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life, will be released in April.
Not Dead at All -- Why Congress was right to stick up for Terri Schiavo.
By Harriet McBryde Johnson
The Terri Schiavo case is hard to write about, hard to think about. Those films are hard to look at. I see that face, maybe smiling, maybe not, and I am reminded of a young woman I knew as a child, lying on a couch, brain-damaged, apparently unresponsive, and deeply beloved—freakishly perhaps but genuinely so—living proof of one family's no-matter-what commitment. I watch nourishment flowing into a slim tube that runs through a neat, round, surgically created orifice in Ms. Schiavo's abdomen, and I'm almost envious. What effortless intake! Due to a congenital neuromuscular disease, I am having trouble swallowing, and it's a constant struggle to get by mouth the calories my skinny body needs. For whatever reason, I'm still trying, but I know a tube is in my future. So, possibly, is speechlessness. That's a scary thought. If I couldn't speak for myself, would I want to die? If I become uncommunicative, a passive object of other people's care, should I hope my brain goes soft and leaves me in peace?
My emotional response is powerful, but at bottom it's not important. It's no more important than anyone else's, not what matters. The things that ought to matter have become obscured in our communal clash of gut reactions. Here are 10 of them:
1. Ms. Schiavo is not terminally ill. She has lived in her current condition for 15 years. This is not about end-of-life decision-making. The question is whether she should be killed by starvation and dehydration.
2. Ms. Schiavo is not dependent on life support. Her lungs, kidneys, heart, and digestive systems work fine. Just as she uses a wheelchair for mobility, she uses a tube for eating and drinking. Feeding Ms. Schiavo is not difficult, painful, or in any way heroic. Feeding tubes are a very simple piece of adaptive equipment, and the fact that Ms. Schiavo eats through a tube should have nothing to do with whether she should live or die.
3. This is not a case about a patient's right to refuse treatment. I don't see eating and drinking as "treatment," but even if they are, everyone agrees that Ms. Schiavo is presently incapable of articulating a decision to refuse treatment. The question is who should make the decision for her, and whether that substitute decision-maker should be authorized to kill her by starvation and dehydration.
4. There is a genuine dispute as to Ms. Schiavo's awareness and consciousness. But if we assume that those who would authorize her death are correct, Ms. Schiavo is completely unaware of her situation and therefore incapable of suffering physically or emotionally. Her death thus can't be justified for relieving her suffering.
5. There is a genuine dispute as to what Ms. Schiavo believed and expressed about life with severe disability before she herself became incapacitated; certainly, she never stated her preferences in an advance directive like a living will. If we assume that Ms. Schiavo is aware and conscious, it is possible that, like most people who live with severe disability for as long as she has, she has abandoned her preconceived fears of the life she is now living. We have no idea whether she wishes to be bound by things she might have said when she was living a very different life. If we assume she is unaware and unconscious, we can't justify her death as her preference. She has no preference.
6. Ms. Schiavo, like all people, incapacitated or not, has a federal constitutional right not to be deprived of her life without due process of law.
7. In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.
8. In other contexts, federal courts are available to make sure state courts respect federally protected rights. This review is critical not only to the parties directly involved, but to the integrity of our legal system. Although review will very often be a futile last-ditch effort—as with most death-penalty habeas petitions—federalism requires that the federal government, not the states, have the last word. When the issue is the scope of a guardian's authority, it is necessary to allow other people, in this case other family members, standing to file a legal challenge.
9. The whole society has a stake in making sure state courts are not tainted by prejudices, myths, and unfounded fears—like the unthinking horror in mainstream society that transforms feeding tubes into fetish objects, emblematic of broader, deeper fears of disability that sometimes slide from fear to disgust and from disgust to hatred. While we should not assume that disability prejudice tainted the Florida courts, we cannot reasonably assume that it did not.
10. Despite the unseemly Palm Sunday pontificating in Congress, the legislation enabling Ms. Schiavo's parents to sue did not take sides in the so-called culture wars. It did not dictate that Ms. Schiavo be fed. It simply created a procedure whereby the federal courts could decide whether Ms. Schiavo's federally protected rights have been violated.
In the Senate, a key supporter of a federal remedy was Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin, a progressive Democrat and longtime friend of labor and civil rights, including disability rights. Harkin told reporters, "There are a lot of people in the shadows, all over this country, who are incapacitated because of a disability, and many times there is no one to speak for them, and it is hard to determine what their wishes really are or were. So I think there ought to be a broader type of a proceeding that would apply to people in similar circumstances who are incapacitated."
I hope against hope that I will never be one of those people in the shadows, that I will always, one way or another, be able to make my wishes known. I hope that I will not outlive my usefulness or my capacity (at least occasionally) to amuse the people around me. But if it happens otherwise, I hope whoever is appointed to speak for me will be subject to legal constraints. Even if my guardian thinks I'd be better off dead—even if I think so myself—I hope to live and die in a world that recognizes that killing, even of people with the most severe disabilities, is a matter of more than private concern.
Clearly, Congress's Palm Sunday legislation was not the "broader type of proceeding" Harkin and I want. It does not define when and how federal court review will be available to all of those in the shadows, but rather provides a procedure for one case only. To create a general system of review, applicable whenever life-and-death decisions intersect with disability rights, will require a reasoned, informed debate unlike what we've had until now. It will take time. But in the Schiavo case, time is running out.
Harriet McBryde Johnson is a disability-rights lawyer in Charleston, S.C. Her memoir in stories, Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life, will be released in April.
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
nathan1977 said:
So that's all life is? Working lungs, kidneys, heart, and digestive systems?
BVS
Blue Crack Supplier
anitram said:
Absolutely.
all_i_want
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BonoVoxSupastar said:
you bet. what else?
Irvine511
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a working brain? consciousness? a quality of life?
let. her. go.
it's the kindest thing.
let. her. go.
it's the kindest thing.
all_i_want
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Irvine511 said:
oh now thats just liberal chit-chat
indra
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anitram said:
It does. And none of it good. To me it shows they are just using her too, the very same way the accuse her husband of doing.
sue4u2
Rock n' Roll Doggie VIP PASS
Irvine511 said:
Irvine, how do you determine when and who should do this "letting go business"? Could you really do it?
My son was born in 1980 with a brain malformation. It was never determined how it happened. It wasn't genetic or the doctors fault or anything I did or didn't do before he was born.
He lived to be 12 years old.
Could I have gone to his doctors and or a Judge - at say, age 6 and tell them, I'm sorry I can't put my life on hold any longer I'm going to stop tube feeding him.
I mean Judge, I haven't had a full nights sleep in 6 years and he has seizures, doctors and physical therapy appointments. Can I just stop feeding him so I can move on?
I don't know how much this husband has gone through with the one exception I took care of my son at home with no professional/nursing help untill the early 90's when President Clinton changed a few laws dealing with medicaid and nursing care. I was able to get a nurse to come in for 6 hours a day. By then I still couldn't leave him because his life was hanging in the balance every day.
Since my older son needed my attention more than my husband, he couldn't deal with it after so many years, so he just went his own way.
Point is,
Even as hard as this life was, I never considered not feeding my child. It's difficult to believe anyone could. Even though I know it is probably done all the time.
It's not as easy as you might think.
Terri would have died, in due course, even with continued tube feedings because of her condition.
I'm horrified to hear on the news just now that her eyes are sunken and her lips are cracked and bleeding because of lack of fluids.
How can someone do this?
With all due respect.. It's not the kindest thing.
IMO
Edited to say: Irvine I wasn't trying to single you out personally, it was just the way I took the "let her go" that made me feel, "that easy for you (and others) to say".
Nothing personal, love...
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deep
Blue Crack Addict
Sue,
I am sorry for your situation.
But, this is not about your son.
This is a different situation.
This woman is an empty shell.
I believe her parent's "selfish" need is wrong.
I respect her husband, he did not abandon her.
I have been in the room with a relative that was gone and had to agree to quit the life support.
Not that it matters, because Terri is gone.
There is no pain
I am sorry for your situation.
But, this is not about your son.
This is a different situation.
This woman is an empty shell.
I believe her parent's "selfish" need is wrong.
I respect her husband, he did not abandon her.
I have been in the room with a relative that was gone and had to agree to quit the life support.
Not that it matters, because Terri is gone.
There is no pain
s_tielemans
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As a dutchman I really should stay out of this due to limited info, and MABY some biased on Holland thrown at me, but let's not kid ourselves here. The real problem is only that the husband and family have different views on the matter. If they wouldn't have this whole debate wouldn't be here and she would be fed or dead.
To see that the whole thing is being picked up by the media and after that by politicians is the real sickening part for me. IMO of course
To see that the whole thing is being picked up by the media and after that by politicians is the real sickening part for me. IMO of course
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