State meddles in private tragedy?

[L.O.A.S.]

Originally Posted by Maeve_Mari

And to make it worse, she told her husband that if anything ever happened to her, that she didn't want to be left in that state either!

Funny that he didn't recall this conversation for 7 years, at least not until he won his court settlement.

Originally Posted by Maeve_Mari

I understand that it is a very fine line between life and quality of life, but her saddened family needs to understand that it is time to let go. Let her go, let their hearts grieve, and let her family move on.

Are you speaking as a parent would? Would you agree that a parent would have a different take on this situation than the man who once was her husband? I can't really call him her husband since he has moved on with his life (with another woman and kids).

[L.O.A.S.]

Originally Posted by Gav

Try reading what I typed again. What I said was that I could think of a better way for her to die.

I stand corrected.

Originally Posted by Gav

You wouldn't leave a dog in this condition - why a human?

Because a human life is infinitely more valuable than a dogs, especially to her parents.

Originally Posted by Gav

I see you've made an interesting use of words as well: "loving parents", ".. husband who wants her dead." Does that indicate your stance? You seem to be indicating a quite black and white way of looking at this.

Yes. As I understand this situation, the husband is not a very honorable person. He used his wife's situation to win a rather large medical suit, which was to go toward her treatment (but was not). It was not until much later that he "recalled" that his wife said she would not like to exist in such a condition. He has since moved on with his life ( with another woman, and had kid(s) as well). Why not leave the decision to the parents who still care for her?

[KShan5[PrFC]]

Because they aren't her guardian as it stands now. No matter who you think should be in charge, when you get married, those responsibilities are passed onto your spouse, not to your parents. So, you have to let him make the decision.

[jeff]

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

You mean to say that starvation doesn't hurt? I can't imagine that it would be a pleasant feeling ( I get grouchy if not fed at least once a day). I am not disputing your wife's claim about deathly ill people (which Terri is not), although I would say that when my back is really bothering me, I don't feel the ache in my knees.

For normal people, starvation is very uncomfortable. For people who are terminally ill, or in Terri Schiavo's case, brain-dead, no. Besides, it won't be the starvation, it will be the dehydration. Coma, then death, with little sensation.

Do you think bed sores from laying in bed 15 years don't cause pain? Prolonging her existence doesn't mean prolonging a pleasant condition.

[Maeve_Mari]

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

Funny that he didn't recall this conversation for 7 years, at least not until he won his court settlement.

and

As I understand this situation, the husband is not a very honorable person. He used his wife's situation to win a rather large medical suit, which was to go toward her treatment (but was not). It was not until much later that he "recalled" that his wife said she would not like to exist in such a condition. He has since moved on with his life ( with another woman, and had kid(s) as well). Why not leave the decision to the parents who still care for her?

L.O.A.S and the rest of us here, I found this article today that sheds some light on Michael and his motives. It answers your question above, but more than that, it is a compelling perspective to this sad story that should be included in the arguments everyone is having over what is right or wrong.


PHILADELPHIA - He has been vilified on Web sites and talk shows. He's been called a wife-abuser, an adulterer, a money-grubbing murderer.

Death threats have been left in his mailbox.

Throngs of protesters have waved signs and chanted outside his house in Clearwater, Fla., and they have gathered again. Sometimes, even Michael Schiavo's friends have wondered why, in the face of all that, he didn't just walk away. It would have been easier for him to relinquish guardianship of his severely incapacitated wife, Terri, to her parents.

So why not give it up, leave Terri's feeding tube in, let her parents care for her? After all, he is living with another woman now and they have two children.

"Because he's sticking by what he promised," Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, said in a recent interview. "He wants to honor the last thing he can give to her."

Physicians have testified that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state and will never improve. Michael Schiavo has said his wife told him she would not want to live like this. Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler say she is responsive and can be helped. They say that, as a Catholic, she would choose life at all costs. Throughout the protracted legal battle, the Schindlers have made their religious views, their personal anguish, and their mistrust of Michael Schiavo a public cause. Intensely private, according to his family and friends, Michael Schiavo has rarely spoken publicly about the matter, out of respect for his wife's privacy. Through his brother, he declined to be interviewed for this story.

However, in recent days he has gone on national TV to reiterate that Terri would not have wanted to live like this and criticize politicians for getting involved in a deeply personal matter. His brother and friends also have decided that it's time to speak up. The mudslinging, they said, has become too ugly, too nasty. "I have a friend who I think has been maligned," said Russ Hyden of Gainesville, Fla. "We're tired of it. We're done. It's time people know who he is," said Scott Schiavo, who lives in Levittown, Pa., near where the brothers were raised.

The thing is, even if Michael Schiavo wins the final court battle, and Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is removed, he really hasn't won at all, Scott said.

"He's already lost," he said. "He's already lost Terri."

His brother and friends describe Michael Schiavo as social within his circle of friends, but otherwise almost reclusive. Except for the No Trespassing sign on his front lawn and the armed guards he occasionally has hired to protect his home, he has tried to grasp whatever shreds of normalcy he can. His friends don't see the demon that protesters who have hurled insults at him do.

Wilma Mackay, a 65-year-old retiree from Palm Harbor, Fla., who watched her husband and brother die of cancer, sees a man who is "the epitome of loyalty."

Bonnie Rowley of Largo, Fla., a friend for about a decade, sees someone who "stands strong on what he believes in, and that is Terri Schiavo. If I needed a health-care advocate, he'd be my first choice. I know he'd be there till the end, and he'd give it one hell of a fight."


Michael Schiavo, 41, was the youngest of five boys. Six-foot-seven, athletic and model-handsome, he met Terri Schindler at Bucks County Community College near Philadelphia in 1982. Married two years later, they moved to Florida, where, early on the morning of Feb. 25, 1990, Michael Schiavo has testified, he awoke to the sound of a thud and found Terri on the floor in the hallway, unconscious. They had been married a little over five years.

He has spent three times as long - the last 15 years - first trying to bring her back, then trying to let her go, his friends and brother say. In the beginning, they say, Schiavo was relentless in his search for his wife's cure. She underwent various therapies. He rented a house large enough for him and Terri's parents, who had moved to the area. He made sure she was dressed every day. He applied her makeup and dabbed on perfume, Rowley said. He went to school to become a nurse, "because he wanted to take care of Terri," Scott said. "He swore that he could get Terri better. ... One doctor said: 'Mike, you know what? There's nothing else we can do. The next time Terri gets sick, why don't you just let nature take its course?' And Mike wouldn't do it."

Many of the defining moments of Michael Schiavo's life have revolved around death.

In 1988, his grandmother was hospitalized with a serious illness. She had signed a "do not resuscitate" order, Scott Schiavo said, but when she worsened in the middle of the night, no one looked at her records.

"It took them I don't know how long to get her breathing again. They stuck a ventilator down her throat." To little avail. "She was brain-dead," Scott Schiavo recounted. All the family could do was wait until medications that kept her heart beating wore off. It took a day and a half, he said.

After the funeral, the family went to the Buck Hotel in Feasterville, Pa. Scott and Terri were sitting next to each other at a large table, where the conversation turned to how upset their grandmother would have been at her final hours. Terri turned to him, Scott Schiavo said, "and she said, 'Not me, no way, I don't want that.' She says, 'If I'm ever like that, oh, don't let me. Pull that tube out of me.'" Scott Schiavo said he testified about the incident in 2000.

Several years after Terri collapsed, Michael Schiavo's mother was diagnosed with cancer. Eventually, medical complications required the removal of her feeding tube, Scott said. "It's not like we said: 'Turn it off.'" She was kept "peaceful and out of pain" until she died, Scott said.

Then their father died.

Eventually, Scott said, his brother realized he would have to let Terri go, too.

The Schindlers - who did not respond to a request for an interview made through their lawyer - have been distrustful of his motives partly because, they have said, no one mentioned Terri's wishes until years after her collapse. But, Scott said, "it's not something you think about while Mike's trying to save her life. ... It's something that people do when there's nothing left to do."

This particular fight has not come without a price.

"I give Mike all the credit in the world, because I would have snapped already. I know how bad it hurts me when I hear people talking about him and downing him," Scott Schiavo said. Most of all, Scott said, "the thing that tears him up is he worries at nighttime, if he's working. He's afraid for the kids and Jodi."

Michael Schiavo met his girlfriend, identified in court records as Jodi Centonze, about a decade ago. Initially, Rowley, who was Centonze's friend, didn't know what to think. The court battles had not yet heated up, but she knew the situation with Terri. When Rowley met Michael Schiavo, what she noticed first was his "great smile, a gentle smile." Gradually, her respect grew. "He could have stepped off and divorced Terri five years ago, when this really hit the court. And got married and started his family that way," Rowley said. The couple has two toddlers - a daughter and a son. Michael Schiavo works in the medical unit of the Pinellas County Jail.

Both Centonze and Michael Schiavo had to face "their own moral dilemmas as far as having children out of wedlock," Rowley said. "But the two of them weren't getting any younger ... So does that make him a bad person because he did that? Did he fluff his responsibility to Terri at any point? No." It is Centonze, Scott Schiavo said, who now does all Terri's laundry. "She's been unbelievable. She supported Mike in everything he did. ... She's gone with Mike to visit Terri. She's helped Mike clean Terri up."

Centonze has been a flashpoint for Michael Schiavo's critics who think it is a reason to disqualify him to be Terri's guardian. His living with Centonze "abrogates the covenant of marriage," said Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, who was among the demonstrators outside the hospice on Friday. Looking back on it now, Scott thinks his brother "just wanted somebody to love him." He equates it with a widower who remarries, "but it doesn't mean that that person stopped loving their spouse that passed on. Mike was very lonely. I mean, he was a 26-year-old kid" when Terri collapsed.

"It's hard to imagine the circumstances he lived under," friend Russ Hyden said. "There was no closure, yet there was no companionship either. That's the worst possible scenario." Hyden had met Schiavo in 1991. Hyden's pregnant wife had been diagnosed with cancer. A mutual friend thought they "might have something in common. And we did." But it was more than that they were both going through "life-changing ordeals," Hyden said. "We both liked to play a little golf. We enjoyed each other's company." Hyden scoffs at the accusations about Schiavo taking the malpractice money awarded to Terri. "If there was so much money, where was that money when I first met Mike? Why wasn't he driving a big car and living in a big home? He was driving a Jeep and living in an apartment."

Hyden's wife lived for almost three more years. He and Schiavo spoke or saw each other several times a week. "He was always great with my kids," Hyden said. Hyden's daughter was 2, his son 7, and Michael brought them gifts. "He spent a great deal of time helping me put my family back together," Hyden said. "Perhaps it was because his had fallen so tragically apart."

In a way, Michael Schiavo has said he can sympathize with Terri's parents. "I have children, and, you know, I couldn't even fathom what it would be like to lose a child," he said in an interview on ``Nightline'' last week. But, he continued, "they know the condition Terri is in. They were there in the beginning. They heard the doctors. They know that Terri's in a persistent vegetative state. They testified to that at the original trial. Fifteen years - you've got to come to grips with it sometime."

He said Terri would "always be a part of my life.

"And to sit here and be called a murderer and an adulterer by people that don't know me, and a governor stepping into my personal, private life, who doesn't know me either? And using his personal gain to win votes, just like the legislators are doing right now, pandering to the religious right, to the people up there, the antiabortion people, standing outside of Tallahassee? "What kind of government is this? This is a human being. This is not right."

In a way, Michael Schiavo's world still revolves around Terri. He calls every day and visits several times a week, Scott Schiavo said. He can still talk to her, even if she doesn't talk back. Michael Schiavo told CNN Saturday that he had a "sense of relief" now that the feeding tube had been removed and he promised to "stay by her side" till the end.

"This is her time ...," he said. "I will love her and I will hold her hand."

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...n/11194418.htm

[jeff]

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

It should be, the question is which family member should have power to make that decision. On one hand there is her loving parents who want to keep her alive. On the other is her husband who wants her dead.

But the husband is the one obeying her wishes (according to a decade+ of Florida legal judgement). It's *her* wishes that should be obeyed in this matter, not anyone else's. BTW, it frequently happens that families refuse to let terminally ill people go, even when the patient has expressed their intention and are on respirators. It's not all that uncommon, and not a pretty picture.

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

Funny should should say this. Would you be jailed for starving your dog?

You can legally euthanize your dog, which you can't do for a human (in the US)

[Gav]

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

Because a human life is infinitely more valuable than a dogs, especially to her parents.

We are going to have agree to disagree. In this situation I think this hypothetical dog has the better deal.

Yes. As I understand this situation, the husband is not a very honorable person. He used his wife's situation to win a rather large medical suit, which was to go toward her treatment (but was not). It was not until much later that he "recalled" that his wife said she would not like to exist in such a condition. He has since moved on with his life ( with another woman, and had kid(s) as well). Why not leave the decision to the parents who still care for her?

I've been following this story, but must have missed this bit. Can I see some citations? Have you met the guy? Have you read the court documents? I'd also like to ask: what is wrong with the guy moving on? It doesn't stop him from loving the memory of his wife. He doesn't believe that she is still alive; why should he still be tied to her? I'd very much like to see the articles that you've read that support your view. How exactly would the press know what has been said between a husband and his wife.

[jeff]

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

Because a human life is infinitely more valuable than a dogs, especially to her parents.

All the more reason to treat it with respect, and not prolong a travesty. You call what she has a life?

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

Yes. As I understand this situation, the husband is not a very honorable person... etc

In other words, you've bought the slander made against this guy. After years tending an empty shell where is wife used to be, do you really blame him for trying to have his own life? Have a little more compassion for _all_ involved.

[jeff]

Originally Posted by KShan5[PrFC]

Because they aren't her guardian as it stands now. No matter who you think should be in charge, when you get married, those responsibilities are passed onto your spouse, not to your parents. So, you have to let him make the decision.

Well said. And that's the law... except when a bunch of politicians want to override it.

[Gav]

Originally Posted by jeff

But the husband is the one obeying her wishes (according to a decade+ of Florida legal judgement). It's *her* wishes that should be obeyed in this matter, not anyone else's. BTW, it frequently happens that families refuse to let terminally ill people go, even when the patient has expressed their intention and are on respirators. It's not all that uncommon, and not a pretty picture.

Yes, and it's this that makes the story the most tragic.

[Maeve_Mari]

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

Funny that he didn't recall this conversation for 7 years, at least not until he won his court settlement.

and

As I understand this situation, the husband is not a very honorable person. He used his wife's situation to win a rather large medical suit, which was to go toward her treatment (but was not). It was not until much later that he "recalled" that his wife said she would not like to exist in such a condition. He has since moved on with his life ( with another woman, and had kid(s) as well). Why not leave the decision to the parents who still care for her?

L.O.A.S and the rest of us here, I found this article today that sheds some light on Michael and his motives. It answers your question above, but more than that, it is a compelling perspective to this sad story that should be included in the arguments everyone is having over what is right or wrong.


PHILADELPHIA - He has been vilified on Web sites and talk shows. He's been called a wife-abuser, an adulterer, a money-grubbing murderer.

Death threats have been left in his mailbox.

Throngs of protesters have waved signs and chanted outside his house in Clearwater, Fla., and they have gathered again. Sometimes, even Michael Schiavo's friends have wondered why, in the face of all that, he didn't just walk away. It would have been easier for him to relinquish guardianship of his severely incapacitated wife, Terri, to her parents.

So why not give it up, leave Terri's feeding tube in, let her parents care for her? After all, he is living with another woman now and they have two children.

"Because he's sticking by what he promised," Scott Schiavo, Michael's brother, said in a recent interview. "He wants to honor the last thing he can give to her."

Physicians have testified that Terri Schiavo is in a persistent vegetative state and will never improve. Michael Schiavo has said his wife told him she would not want to live like this. Her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler say she is responsive and can be helped. They say that, as a Catholic, she would choose life at all costs. Throughout the protracted legal battle, the Schindlers have made their religious views, their personal anguish, and their mistrust of Michael Schiavo a public cause. Intensely private, according to his family and friends, Michael Schiavo has rarely spoken publicly about the matter, out of respect for his wife's privacy. Through his brother, he declined to be interviewed for this story.

However, in recent days he has gone on national TV to reiterate that Terri would not have wanted to live like this and criticize politicians for getting involved in a deeply personal matter. His brother and friends also have decided that it's time to speak up. The mudslinging, they said, has become too ugly, too nasty. "I have a friend who I think has been maligned," said Russ Hyden of Gainesville, Fla. "We're tired of it. We're done. It's time people know who he is," said Scott Schiavo, who lives in Levittown, Pa., near where the brothers were raised.

The thing is, even if Michael Schiavo wins the final court battle, and Terri Schiavo's feeding tube is removed, he really hasn't won at all, Scott said.

"He's already lost," he said. "He's already lost Terri."

His brother and friends describe Michael Schiavo as social within his circle of friends, but otherwise almost reclusive. Except for the No Trespassing sign on his front lawn and the armed guards he occasionally has hired to protect his home, he has tried to grasp whatever shreds of normalcy he can. His friends don't see the demon that protesters who have hurled insults at him do.

Wilma Mackay, a 65-year-old retiree from Palm Harbor, Fla., who watched her husband and brother die of cancer, sees a man who is "the epitome of loyalty."

Bonnie Rowley of Largo, Fla., a friend for about a decade, sees someone who "stands strong on what he believes in, and that is Terri Schiavo. If I needed a health-care advocate, he'd be my first choice. I know he'd be there till the end, and he'd give it one hell of a fight."


Michael Schiavo, 41, was the youngest of five boys. Six-foot-seven, athletic and model-handsome, he met Terri Schindler at Bucks County Community College near Philadelphia in 1982. Married two years later, they moved to Florida, where, early on the morning of Feb. 25, 1990, Michael Schiavo has testified, he awoke to the sound of a thud and found Terri on the floor in the hallway, unconscious. They had been married a little over five years.

He has spent three times as long - the last 15 years - first trying to bring her back, then trying to let her go, his friends and brother say. In the beginning, they say, Schiavo was relentless in his search for his wife's cure. She underwent various therapies. He rented a house large enough for him and Terri's parents, who had moved to the area. He made sure she was dressed every day. He applied her makeup and dabbed on perfume, Rowley said. He went to school to become a nurse, "because he wanted to take care of Terri," Scott said. "He swore that he could get Terri better. ... One doctor said: 'Mike, you know what? There's nothing else we can do. The next time Terri gets sick, why don't you just let nature take its course?' And Mike wouldn't do it."

Many of the defining moments of Michael Schiavo's life have revolved around death.

In 1988, his grandmother was hospitalized with a serious illness. She had signed a "do not resuscitate" order, Scott Schiavo said, but when she worsened in the middle of the night, no one looked at her records.

"It took them I don't know how long to get her breathing again. They stuck a ventilator down her throat." To little avail. "She was brain-dead," Scott Schiavo recounted. All the family could do was wait until medications that kept her heart beating wore off. It took a day and a half, he said.

After the funeral, the family went to the Buck Hotel in Feasterville, Pa. Scott and Terri were sitting next to each other at a large table, where the conversation turned to how upset their grandmother would have been at her final hours. Terri turned to him, Scott Schiavo said, "and she said, 'Not me, no way, I don't want that.' She says, 'If I'm ever like that, oh, don't let me. Pull that tube out of me.'" Scott Schiavo said he testified about the incident in 2000.

Several years after Terri collapsed, Michael Schiavo's mother was diagnosed with cancer. Eventually, medical complications required the removal of her feeding tube, Scott said. "It's not like we said: 'Turn it off.'" She was kept "peaceful and out of pain" until she died, Scott said.

Then their father died.

Eventually, Scott said, his brother realized he would have to let Terri go, too.

The Schindlers - who did not respond to a request for an interview made through their lawyer - have been distrustful of his motives partly because, they have said, no one mentioned Terri's wishes until years after her collapse. But, Scott said, "it's not something you think about while Mike's trying to save her life. ... It's something that people do when there's nothing left to do."

This particular fight has not come without a price.

"I give Mike all the credit in the world, because I would have snapped already. I know how bad it hurts me when I hear people talking about him and downing him," Scott Schiavo said. Most of all, Scott said, "the thing that tears him up is he worries at nighttime, if he's working. He's afraid for the kids and Jodi."

Michael Schiavo met his girlfriend, identified in court records as Jodi Centonze, about a decade ago. Initially, Rowley, who was Centonze's friend, didn't know what to think. The court battles had not yet heated up, but she knew the situation with Terri. When Rowley met Michael Schiavo, what she noticed first was his "great smile, a gentle smile." Gradually, her respect grew. "He could have stepped off and divorced Terri five years ago, when this really hit the court. And got married and started his family that way," Rowley said. The couple has two toddlers - a daughter and a son. Michael Schiavo works in the medical unit of the Pinellas County Jail.

Both Centonze and Michael Schiavo had to face "their own moral dilemmas as far as having children out of wedlock," Rowley said. "But the two of them weren't getting any younger ... So does that make him a bad person because he did that? Did he fluff his responsibility to Terri at any point? No." It is Centonze, Scott Schiavo said, who now does all Terri's laundry. "She's been unbelievable. She supported Mike in everything he did. ... She's gone with Mike to visit Terri. She's helped Mike clean Terri up."

Centonze has been a flashpoint for Michael Schiavo's critics who think it is a reason to disqualify him to be Terri's guardian. His living with Centonze "abrogates the covenant of marriage," said Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, who was among the demonstrators outside the hospice on Friday. Looking back on it now, Scott thinks his brother "just wanted somebody to love him." He equates it with a widower who remarries, "but it doesn't mean that that person stopped loving their spouse that passed on. Mike was very lonely. I mean, he was a 26-year-old kid" when Terri collapsed.

"It's hard to imagine the circumstances he lived under," friend Russ Hyden said. "There was no closure, yet there was no companionship either. That's the worst possible scenario." Hyden had met Schiavo in 1991. Hyden's pregnant wife had been diagnosed with cancer. A mutual friend thought they "might have something in common. And we did." But it was more than that they were both going through "life-changing ordeals," Hyden said. "We both liked to play a little golf. We enjoyed each other's company." Hyden scoffs at the accusations about Schiavo taking the malpractice money awarded to Terri. "If there was so much money, where was that money when I first met Mike? Why wasn't he driving a big car and living in a big home? He was driving a Jeep and living in an apartment."

Hyden's wife lived for almost three more years. He and Schiavo spoke or saw each other several times a week. "He was always great with my kids," Hyden said. Hyden's daughter was 2, his son 7, and Michael brought them gifts. "He spent a great deal of time helping me put my family back together," Hyden said. "Perhaps it was because his had fallen so tragically apart."

In a way, Michael Schiavo has said he can sympathize with Terri's parents. "I have children, and, you know, I couldn't even fathom what it would be like to lose a child," he said in an interview on ``Nightline'' last week. But, he continued, "they know the condition Terri is in. They were there in the beginning. They heard the doctors. They know that Terri's in a persistent vegetative state. They testified to that at the original trial. Fifteen years - you've got to come to grips with it sometime."

He said Terri would "always be a part of my life.

"And to sit here and be called a murderer and an adulterer by people that don't know me, and a governor stepping into my personal, private life, who doesn't know me either? And using his personal gain to win votes, just like the legislators are doing right now, pandering to the religious right, to the people up there, the antiabortion people, standing outside of Tallahassee? "What kind of government is this? This is a human being. This is not right."

In a way, Michael Schiavo's world still revolves around Terri. He calls every day and visits several times a week, Scott Schiavo said. He can still talk to her, even if she doesn't talk back. Michael Schiavo told CNN Saturday that he had a "sense of relief" now that the feeding tube had been removed and he promised to "stay by her side" till the end.

"This is her time ...," he said. "I will love her and I will hold her hand."

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...n/11194418.htm

[L.O.A.S.]

Originally Posted by jeff

For normal people, starvation is very uncomfortable. For people who are terminally ill, or in Terri Schiavo's case, brain-dead, no. Besides, it won't be the starvation, it will be the dehydration. Coma, then death, with little sensation.

Do you think bed sores from laying in bed 15 years don't cause pain? Prolonging her existence doesn't mean prolonging a pleasant condition.

I just copied this from a pro-Terri site.
Terri's behavior does not meet the medical or statutory definition of persistent vegetative state. Terri responds to stimuli, tries to communicate verbally, follows limited commands, laughs or cries in interaction with loved ones, physically distances herself from irritating or painful stimulation and watches loved ones as they move around her. None of these behaviors are simple reflexes and are, instead, voluntary and cognitive. Though Terri has limitations, she does interact purposefully with her environment.

What if she can feel pain? I'm sure bed sores are unpleasant, but would you still want to put her out of her misery?

[L.O.A.S.]

Originally Posted by jeff

In other words, you've bought the slander made against this guy.

Yes. I do not know any of these people. My opinion is based on reading and hearing points of view of those whom I normally agree with.

Originally Posted by jeff

Have a little more compassion for _all_ involved.

I try to, although in this case I have more compassion for the parents.

[achilleus]

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

...
but would you still want to put her out of her misery?

Yes.

If the choice were mine, I would put her out of her misery.

The choice however isn't mine, nor is it her parents, nor the governments, nor anyone else's in the world.

[Gav]

Originally Posted by jeff

In other words, you've bought the slander made against this guy.

Originally Posted by L.O.A.S.

Yes. I do not know any of these people. My opinion is based on reading and hearing points of view of those whom I normally agree with.

So you admit buying into the slander? And you admit to not reading opposing views - in fact you only read the points of view of those who you agree with? You've no interest in looking at the evidence and considering an opposing view?