Let Terri die in peace

It should come as no surprise that the Florida Congress is again trying to circumvent the Court's ruling that Terri Schiavo should have the right to die. It's ironic how quickly they can move thru the process when in most cases it takes months to get legislation thru.

There are quite a few things that bother me about this case. First the media falling for the outright propaganda of the video. Anyone who has bothered to do any research on this situation knows it took the parents over four and a half hours of video taping to get a few seconds where it looks like Terri is responding.

Second the creation of Michael Schiavo being a monster by our supposed "liberal media" irks me to the point of spending hours emailing each Florida congressperson individually. If the goal would have been to "make" Terri die and take all of the money he is not an intelligent man. A man who wanted a person to die in that circumstance would move her to a substandard care facility where she would have had a better chance of getting some type of infection that would have hastened her death. He wouldn't have spent the huge amounts of money that have been spent on this legal fight if money was the goal.

The recent accusations of Michael causing Terri's condition is also bothersome. Would you as a parent let a man live with you that you believed abused your daughter? Would you wait until you were angry that he refused to give you money from a lawsuit before you decided to try to have him removed as her guardian? When the first attempt to have him removed as her guardian in 1994 was refused would you give up if you thought this man had done this to her? I surely wouldn't. I definitely would not wait over a decade to make the accusations public. If he really had this huge fear she was going to wake up and "tell" on him his prior actions make no sense. He for four years continued to do everything possible including going to California with her to have an experimental implant put in her brain to try to stimulate it.

Eventually the reality of what the doctors had been telling him hit home, that Terri was not going to ever recover. What is Michael's real crime? In the eyes of some it is that he got involved with another woman and got her pregnant. That somehow makes him a murderer to attempt to follow thru with what the court agreed was Terri's wishes, that she not be kept alive under those conditions.

I am a Catholic, however I agree with the Catholic priest who testified during the first trial in 1998 that Catholics are not required to be kept alive no matter what, that there comes a time when a person should be allowed to die. If she was a practicing Catholic, which it has been proven she wasn't, but even if she was, the act of ending life support of any sort is not a sin. With medical technology creating a situation where the person would have died without artifical means we are playing God, once we remove God from the equation then when do we let him back in? Yes there are times when temporary life support means there is hope that the person will recover and be able to live, but there also comes a time when we will die.

If Terri had a living will that stated her wishes one way or the other this would not even be an issue. However that was left up to the courts to decide, they did not rush into this on a whim and say "Kill her now", a great deal of time, and evidence went into this decision. With the exception of one doctor who felt his hyperbolic chamber technique that has not been accepted as anything but "weird science" would bring Terri out of her vegetative state there has not been credible doctor that has stated she has any chance of recovery of any kind.

Terri has become the poster child for the Right to Life movement, they should not be allowed to force constitutional changes designed to circumvent our court system. The fact that they are trying to word this so it does not appear worded just for Terri is a sham, we all know better.