It's such a depressing story, and it isn't over yet. They're now bickering over her funeral.

The issue was not whether or not she was cognitively able to continue existence, it was the fact that her so-called husband denied any services to her that would help her rehabilitate...and there was a time when she could have recieved the therapy that she needed to be able to eat on her own. She still would have needed assistance, but physical therapy would have allowed her to keep from being bed-ridden.

I am getting the feeling that the British press has been extremely manipulative in reporting the exact facts of the case ie saying that she was on life-support and was in a coma, both of which were not true...at least inasfar as needing food and water to sustain life was 'life support.' Which is really very upsetting to me, because it serves only one purpose, and that of the euthenasia crowd.

She had never been in a coma. Michael however, denied all services of therapy from the time she entered into the hospital, to the point of pleading to the Florida courts for money in a lawsuit to pay for her therapy...and then denying said therapy once he got the money. Not to mention starting a new family with another woman without the benefit of a divorce and relinquishment of responsibility.

Bottom line though, the media has been particularly cruel in advancing the idea that it is okay to starve someone to death simply because they are no longer at the functioning level of 'everyone else.' We have envirowhack groups who go into hysterics at any report of abandoned kittens and how could anyone be so cruel as to keep them from eating/drinking, but its okay to starve to death a human being simply because no one is really able to determine what her wishes actually are.

There is strong indication that Michael manipulated the courts and the courts manipulated public opinion to achieve a bulkhead in the euthenasia agenda through Terri Schiavo...not to mention gross miscarriages of justice. The courts in Florida were given every chance in the world to recuse Michael and give Terri a voice, but Felos and Greer puts stoppers to all of it. This is what has people so upset.

Am terribly sorry for the rant, and it is a rant directed solely at those idiots who have misled the UK population in information, but I had to speak up.

Hope all is well your way!

Hi, Sharon. How's things? I hope you're keeping well.

I see what you mean about the British media, but I think they've been under-reporting it, not misreporting it. It's a story about a foreign woman thousands of miles away, so it hasn't got a lot of coverage here. The typical TV news report on the case has been maybe 60 seconds long. Unfortunately, the nature of the case is such that every detail is important, so a quick summary of the case is bound to give the wrong impression. But no, it's not that the British media have a pro-euthanasia agenda.

Of course, in these days of the Magical Interweb, I don't get my American news from the British media. Why would I? By the time this was reported in Britain, I'd known about it for months.

Anyway, I agree with most of what you say. My post doesn't say what you seem to think it says, and I can only advise that you read it again. Just to clarify, the penultimate paragraph isn't about Terri Schiavo.

I think you're probably right that the Florida courts had already decided to legalise euthanasia and viewed this as a handy test case — and Terri, therefore, as a pawn. Judicial activism's a big problem in the US, and I don't know what you guys are going to do about it. I wouldn't want to see judges elected — justice isn't supposed to change according to the whims of the public — but they've got to have their power limited somehow. I suppose one answer might be to have a total separation of powers between the courts that rule on everyday matters of law and those that interpret the Constitution. Not sure what use that could have been in this case, though.

Felos sounds like an incredibly nasty piece of work. What he's written about the Holocaust is disgusting. And I hope that Michael Schiavo one day finds his life in someone else's hands. Someone, perhaps, who doesn't much like him.