X-Message-Number: 24573 Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2004 11:09:54 -0700 From: James Swayze <> Subject: Now this is a conundrum Friends and colleagues, I'm pasting the entire article here below as well as providing the lnik to the original here: http://www.comcast.net/News/HEALTHWELLNESS//XML/1500_Health__medical/52a2f125-80d7-4517-b704-6d8481a636f2.html My comments: This is quite interesting. On the one hand I side with those wishing not to be kept alive while in a persistive vegetative state and hold for the rights of all not just the disabled to choose their own time of ending or not ending life. No government should have the final say, except to protect those rights and make certain no one is abusing those rights either in forcing someone unable to speak for themselves to either live longer than they would have wished or die prematurely. However, Jeb Bush may have bitten off more than he expected unless he is a closet Immortalist. His words may have trapped him in a positive position towards encouraging anti aging research and the right to take measures to extend one's life. Of course I am making a bit of an assumption here that he would follow his brother's and family's fundamentalist Christian motives to limit "monkeying with Gawd's will". Note below the quotes of his I have highlighted by placing *** before and after. They are quite interesting when taken in context of coming technologies to extend human life and health span. Or has he really considered extended health span? On the other hand for cryonicists wishing to have the right to deanimate before a brain malady can do identity robbing damage, Jeb Bush's "Terri's Law" passed in Florida and under dispute, could cause some difficulties if expanded upon to further limit the right to euthanasia being fought for around the country. [Begin article] Case of Brain-Damaged Woman Heads to Court 4 hours ago By JACKIE HALLIFAX, Associated Press Writer [picture caption] Terri Schiavo's brother Bobby Schindler speaks at a news conference ...More... TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Six days after Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at the request of her husband, a hospital began again pumping fluids into the brain-damaged woman on orders from Gov. Jeb Bush. Both men have remained rivals in one of the nation's longest and most bitter right-to-die battles, a struggle that has embroiled all branches of state government and is now in the Florida Supreme Court. The question before the court is whether the law Bush signed in October to keep the 40-year-old Schiavo alive violates her constitutional right to privacy and the separation of government powers. While lawyers for Schiavo's husband, Michael, and Bush battle in court, Terri Schiavo herself will be some 200 miles away in a nursing home in Clearwater. The court's decision could ultimately determine whether she lives or dies. This is the first time Florida's Supreme Court has agreed to take up any aspect of the 14-year-old case. The court has no deadline for issuing its decision. Terri Schiavo suffered brain damage in 1990 when her heart stopped beating, a condition brought on by an eating disorder. She left no written instructions in the event she became incapacitated. Schiavo can breathe on her own but relies on a feeding tube to live. Some medical experts have declared she is in a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery. Her husband has argued that she would not want to be kept alive in this way. But her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, have disputed that and argued that she could someday regain some of her faculties. A judge ruled that there was clear and convincing evidence that Schiavo would not have wanted to be kept alive artificially, and last October, Michael Schiavo withdrew the feeding tube. But in a remarkable week of emotion and political activism by her parents' supporters, Bush pushed "Terri's Law" through the Legislature and forced the reinsertion of the tube. The law was narrowly drafted to give the governor authority to issue such an order. Later, Circuit Judge W. Douglas Baird ruled the law wrongly allowed Bush to intervene in a matter of personal privacy and was improperly used by the governor to override a court decision with which he did not agree. The tube is in place in the meantime. On Tuesday, her husband's lawyers were being given 20 minutes to argue his claim that Bush had no right to invade her privacy by countermanding her wishes that she not be kept alive by artificial means. Lawyers for Bush will get the same amount of time to argue that the governor did the right thing by using a law to reverse Michael Schiavo's orders. National groups have lined up on each side. Opponents of the law include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Academy of Florida Elder Law Attorneys, and Autonomy Inc., a group that supports the decision-making rights of the disabled. "Their point is disabled people as well as other people also have a right to privacy and also have a right to make their own medical treatment decisions and just because you're disabled doesn't mean that they're second-class citizens whose medical treatment decisions can be disregarded," said George Felos, Michael Schiavo's attorney. In addition, Felos said the law violates the separation of powers because Bush used it to circumvent a properly issued court ruling reached after more than six years of litigation, scores of hearings and an appeals court review. Representatives of seven groups backing Bush, including an organization called Not Dead Yet, attended a Monday press conference in Tallahassee to lay out their position. The Illinois-based group opposes "the growing threat of legalized euthanasia against disabled people, old and young, especially the intellectually disabled," said its president, Diane Coleman. Bush has said he thinks the case may help spark a national debate about the ethics of sustaining life. *** "These issues are going to be more and more important as technologies change to be able to sustain life as well as in general, just with the aging of our population," Bush said Friday. *** Terri Schiavo's younger brother, Bobby Schindler, attended Monday's press conference and argued that his sister appears to laugh and to react to her surroundings. "I know she sees and hears us," he told reporters. "I see her response. It is not wishful thinking. Terri isn't brain-dead. She's disabled." [end] My comment: This fight is characterized by the extremists that have come out on both sides. However, I tend to find more extreme certain members of the "Pro-Life" crowd which are in fact actually just extremist anti abortionists applying their standard only as a means to an end to support their anti abortion agenda not for the their purported support for rights of the disabled but their religious misguided or warped sense of what to meddle in.... ie. everyone else's business but their own. Some of these will use any tactic especially lying and slanted propaganda to push their will on others. In the Schiavo case they have accused the husband of murder and abuse and even implied premeditation because of an alleged affair predating Terri's illness. The official record forher illness and cause for the brain damage is quite different. These particular Pro-Lifers are anything but Pro Life. They sure don't want people dying of a multitude of diseases or trapped in paralysis or brain disorders cured through Somatic Cell Nuclear Transfer. A technology we may need as a step on the way to aging rejuvination. James -- Membership in order of joining --- all comments on any subject are soley my opinion only and not reflective of the official positions of the following: Cryonics Institute of Michigan http://www.cryonics.org The Immortalist Society http://www.cryonics.org/info.html The Society for Venturism http://www.venturist.org Immortality Institute http://www.imminst.org Methuselah Foundation http://www.methuselahfoundation.org Methuselah Mouse Prize http://www.methuselahmouse.org [Give $$$ for life!] World Transhumanist Assoc. http://www.transhumanism.org/ MY WEBSITE: http://www.davidpascal.com/swayze/ Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=24573