Yesterday (March 31) marked five years since the death of Terri Schiavo, the young woman who was starved and dehydrated by orders from Circuit Court Judge, George W. Greer.Terri's brother, Bobby Schindler, Director of the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, wrote a stirring column for Town Hall in which he laments that the culture of death is only getting worse in America. It's a very important warning.
I wish I could say things have changed for the better since my sister’s death or that people with cognitive disabilities are now better protected in response to the horror she had to endure.
Tragically, however, it seems the rights of the brain-injured, elderly and others are still being violated.
All one has to do is look at what happened just last week. On March 21st, Fox aired an episode of The Family Guy that featured a "sketch" called "Terri Schiavo: The Musical." I was astonished at the producer’s cruel bigotry directed towards my sister and all cognitively disabled people.
Sadly, although more offensive than what my family has seen in the past from the media since Terri died, the bald-faced ignorance expressed in that episode of The Family Guy was nothing new. In fact, all signs indicate that we have embarked on a very disturbing path...
In Terri’s name, my family now works to protect tens of thousands of people with similar brain-injuries from having their fundamental freedoms taken away by an aggressive anti-life movement hell-bent on portraying severely disabled and otherwise vulnerable human beings as nothing more than “useless eaters”.
If the amount of phone calls we receive is any indication, what happened to Terri has become common. I think most people have no idea how our individual rights to make decisions about basic care like food and water, antibiotics, etc., have been so dramatically eroded. This not only includes family members advocating for loved ones but also protecting oneself by medical directive...
Perhaps the “Death Panels” Sarah Palin spoke of sounded like bombastic language. Yet when Palin added this term into our nation’s debate on health care, I believe she did not realize that many hospitals and facilities already have something frighteningly similar. Ethics committees are making many life and death decisions about patients, including whether to withhold simple provisions.
In a seemingly clandestine way, these ethics committees – comprised of medical and legal professionals – are empowering facilities to make life and death decisions independent of the family or a person’s own wishes.
The chilling stories we receive make it clear few citizens have any idea how vulnerable they are when it comes to judgments left in the hands of these ethics committees and facilities. And with the federal government now controlling our health care, there is no reason not to believe that these types of committees won’t become nationalized. Particularly when a health care system has been sabotaged by cost factors and quality of life judgments...
