Please read more about Terri...

Welcome, Hugh Hewitt visitors.

For more information about Terri, including the most recent updates on an almost hourly basis, check Hyscience and Blogs for Terri.

In brief: Terri Schiavo is a Florida woman who suffered brain damage after a collapse in her home in 1990, and since then has been severely disabled.

Her husband, Michael, wants her to die. That's blunt, but there’s no other way to say it, because he has refused all other options such as divorce (so he can marry the woman he’s already had two children with), and financial offers from Terri’s parents.

He insists that Terri wouldn’t want to live this way (a dubious, unsupported claim), and has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers, trying to get the right to kill her by starvation and dehydration. The money is coming from a medical malpractice award related to Terri’s early care; it was supposed to be spent on Terri’s care and therapy, but Michael has refused to allow any rehabilitation for her at all, even such basic medical care as antibiotics for a minor infection.

She’s not dying; she’s living, and yet she’s been housed in a hospice.

She’s not a “vegetable” (in a Persistent Vegetative State). She responds to stimuli, in particular, to her mother and father. She laughs. She verbalizes, and even speaks a few words. She is clearly very disabled, but she is also conscious, sentient, and aware.

She’s not kept alive by machines; she simply receives her food three times a day via a tube, instead of via fork and spoon.

She has parents who love her dearly and have offered Michael anything he wants so they could take custody of her. They want no money from Michael.

But he refuses to allow them to care for her.

Please read more about this case in some of my previous posts, but especially at the links above in this post. Then, please consider joining the effort to save Terri's life, via the links above.

It's not just about Terri. It's about a the murder of a woman by court order; it's about the right to life for disabled people; it's about all of us, eventually.

UPDATE: Fixed the link to Terri's Fight; it's .org, not .com. Sorry about that, and h/t to my brother for giving me the heads up.