According to Terri Schiavo’s autopsy report, she was severely brain-damaged. OK.
For me, the whole tragedy surrounding Terri and the people who wanted her dead didn’t hinge on how severely brain-damaged she was. She was alive and wasn’t on life support, and her husband’s credibility was extremely low, too low to trust his assertion that Terri wanted to die if ever severely brain-damaged. Forget about what you’d want if you were ever in the same condition. Take yourselves out of the equation.
The way they killed her was appalling, and I was angry for a long time afterward. I’m giving you a heads-up. Don’t be alarmed or disgusted by the liberal media and liberal bloggers (and some conservatives, too) declaring that Terri’s wayward husband is somehow “vindicated” by the autopsy report. The doctor-induced starvation was immoral.
Look at the thing itself, to paraphrase a fictional man-eater paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius. What is it in itself? What is its nature, this culture of death?
It is dark, dank, and putrid. And hungry.
Related posts and links: See the entire Schiavo category for background, Damnum Absque Injuria, Blogs for Terri, Pro-Life Blogs, ThreeBadFingers…
News: NYTimes, CNSNews, MSNBC (autopsy report “backs” husband), Associated Press, more Associated Press…
Update (6/16): Michelle Malkin responds:
Late last night, I took the time to read the 39-page autopsy report of Terri Schiavo–something which, it is clear to me, most of the callous gloaters on the other side of this debate have not bothered to do. And will never do. These are people who can only talk about the sanctity of life if it’s enclosed in ghost quotes and pronounced with a sneer.You do not need a medical examiner’s license to see that the report raises many more questions than it answers, though from the (once again) misleading media coverage, we are led to believe that the matters of Terri’s life and murder are resolved. They are not.
Blogger and radio show host Cindy Swanson interviewed Schindler family attorney, David Gibbs III. An excerpt:
DAVID: We need to remember that the IME, the independent medical examiner, is looking at a dead body, a corpse, and trying to evaluate by looking at what is there and essentially, we understood as the Schindler family and as the legal team that Terri was brain-injured. And he has confirmed in that report that indeed she was significantly brain-injured.But that does not eliminate some of the questions that still remain as to what caused her injuries, and certainly what we would call the larger moral or legal issues still remain.
The IME said clearly that Terri was not terminal, and what that means is she was not going to die because of her brain-injured condition, her disability; she had no living will, she’d put nothing in writing as to her wishes; her heart was remarkably strong and would have continued for many years; and that the immediate cause of death was this brutal dehydration that Terri was taken, where she had no hydration, no nourishment, and died over those period of days.
