Bobby Schindler says his memory is seared with images of his sister, Terri Schiavo, after courts approved removal of her feeding tube in a high-profile right-to-die/right-to-life battle he says wasn't always fairly portrayed in the media.
... "She was beautiful, she was alive, she was a human being and had a family willing to . . . show her compassion as every human being deserves. But the courts decided she would be better off dead."
About six months have passed since Schiavo died. And Schindler is on an international speaking tour of sorts, criticizing the right-to-die movement and, through the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, pushing for changes in federal and state laws to protect the lives of the elderly and people with disabilities.
He addressed about 150 people at Westminster College Wednesday night and spoke with the Deseret Morning News beforehand. Student leaders had invited him after learning he had spoken to another university, free of charge. His Salt Lake speech also included no honorarium, he said....
Read the rest at the link. (Hat tip: Blogs for Terri.
A couple of points I want to touch on here. The Terri Schiavo case never was about the right to die. It was about the right to live - without which the right to die is meaningless. A lot of liberals were just sure this was a case of some crazed right-wingers trying to keep a woman alive against her wishes. But the nature of Terri's wishes was - in my view, and in the view of many reasonable people - very much open to question. And to compensate for the weakness of the evidence for Terri's supposed wish to die, the kill-Terri side hedged their bets by inviting us to make assumptions about what Terri would want, or what we would want if we were in her place.
There's a lot more I want to say about this, but Shabbat is coming, so I'm going to stop for now.
