Yet Another Posting on Terri

I've been largely ignoring this whole mess with Terri Schiavo, mostly because I thought it wasn't a big deal. I thought it was just a few whack jobs making a stink for their unltra-conservative-religious agenda. I thought for sure that this thing would blow over weeks ago, and Terri would be disconnected and her body could join her mind in sweet oblivion.

How foolish of me not to see that this was the perfect opportunity for the fundies and conservatives to make this an example of how they are in control this country now and damn the constitution and it checks and balances they are going to push their "culture of life" and turn this country into a Theocracy. It has gone just too far.

For those who may have also been ignoring the case (althought that is getting more and more difficult to do) here are the basics. Terri Schiavo who was possibly suffering from bulemia had heart failure in 1990 due to complications from aggressive dieting. This heart failure stopped the flow of oxegen to her cerebral cortex causing irreparable brain damage.  Terri remains 15 years later, unresponsive, brain dead, still able to breath on her own, but fed through a tube.

Her husband Michael Schiavo won a malpractice suit in 1992 for 1.2 million dollars that has been helping to sustain Terri ever since. Michael has been fighting Terri's parents in state courts for seven years for the right to disconnect Terri from her feeding tube. While Terri never wrote a living will stating her desires in a case such as this, Michael says that in conversations with her prior she had expressed her will to be let to die.

Now here's where things get interesting. Michael finally won in a Florida State court, this right to end Terri's life, and Terri has been disconnected from her feeding tube as of Friday. Over the weekend, the conservative controlled Legislative branch and Executive branch decided to way overstep their bounds and intervene in what should have been a purely Judiciary decision. Congress, the Senate and President Bush all conspired to create and pass a single law applying only to this single person, Terri Schiavo, forcing this case to be reviewed at the Federal Judiciary level. Never in the history of our great country have the checks and balances been so utterly stomped upon.

Fortunately as it stands right now, the Federal Judges are seeing things much the same way as the State Judges and are refusing to order her feeding tube reconnected. That leaves Terri with less than two weeks to live.

Now on to the opinion piece. Terri died 15 years ago. Sure, the parts of her brain that control breathing and circulation still work, but the parts that form conciousness, the parts that make us human, give us higher thought, allow us to think, feel and reason are mush! Literally! Look at this posting on the Pharyngula Blog. (This guy is a real scientist) He has a comparison of a CT scan of Schiavo's brain, next to a normal brain. See that big empty cavity in the middle? That's the Cebral Cortex. It's liquid! It will NEVER work again. Terri is dead, and Michael has been fighting for seven years to let the rest of her die as well.

Now the conservatives and the fundamentalists and Terri's parents are trying to paint Michael as a selfish greedy monster, who would just like to get his poor wife out of his way by killing her. They are making this all about Terri and her right to live, the Bush administration is promoting this whole "Culture of Life" crap. But it's all a load of horse shit. Terri's dead and Michael is a widower, he just hasn't been allowed to move on because our legal definition of dead doesn't quite fit in this case. So in reality, this is not about Terri at all. This is about Michael being allowed to continue life as any widower would have been expected to do 15 years ago (after a proper period of mourning of course) and it's about Terri's parents being unable to let go of their daughter, desperately grasping for hope in a lifeless empty hollow shell of a body.

Michael is not a monster. In some ways he has moved on. He has a girlfriend and two children with that girlfriend. But he has also refused to divorce Terri, and has refused an offer of 10 million dollars to hand her over to her parents custody, because he believes that she would not want to be kept this way. Why the hell does our government see fit to step in and continue this man's hardships? Why do they want to get so involved in one families battle while there are so many larger things going on in this world that needs our government's attention. We are still at WAR!

And in a perfect example of Bush's "Culture of Life" last week, a 6 month old baby died in a Texas hospital, because of a bill that George W. Bush signed into law while Governor of that great state. A law that allows attending physicians and hospital ethics boards to pull the plug on patients if the money to support them has run out, even if that specifically contradicts patient or family wishes. This baby was not brain dead, but did require help through a breathing tube. This is our country's "Culture of Life".