May the politicians and moralistic exploitation-ors allow....

[whistle]

...Terri Schiavo to now rest in peace.

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June 16, 2005
Autopsy on the Schiavo Tragedy

The autopsy results released yesterday should embarrass all the opportunistic politicians and agenda-driven agitators who meddled in Terri Schiavo's right-to-die case. There is no evidence that Ms. Schiavo's husband did any of the awful things attributed to him, and no hope that her greatly damaged brain would ever have recovered. The courts were right to conclude that she should be allowed to die after 15 years in what her doctors described as a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery.

The autopsy and a broader investigation conducted by medical examiners in Florida inevitably left some questions without definitive answers. That reflects the limitations of a pathological examination and the uncertainties of clinical medicine. But what the inquiry did reveal leaves little doubt that death was the merciful finale to this tragic case.

The medical examiners found Ms. Schiavo's brain "profoundly atrophied," only half the normal size, and said that "no amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons." Although the autopsy could not definitively establish that Ms. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, the findings were deemed "very consistent" with that diagnosis. She was completely blind and could not have swallowed food or water safely on her own. Those conclusions underscore how shallow and cynical were the judgments-from-afar by the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, who is a doctor, and by other Republicans in Congress who contended that Ms. Schiavo looked responsive and that her condition might be amenable to treatment.

The medical investigation disproved paranoid theories that Michael Schiavo had injured his wife, either at the time of the accident or while she lay in medical institutions all those years. The autopsy was unable to pinpoint what caused her collapse in 1990, but the inquiry found no evidence of neglect, abuse, strangulation or other trauma. Nor did it find that any poison, drugs or other substances had been administered to her to hasten her death.

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<link> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/16/opinion/16thu3.html?th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

The biggest political opportunist who exploited the Terri Schivo tragedy and her parents was none other than Jeb Bush, who cynically used the Schivo case to get elected as Florida Governor in 1998 and reelected in 2002 by mustering the right-to-life vote around his support of Schiavo by keeping the battle going in the Florida court of appeals against the wishes of the husband Michael Schiavo, whose claimed that his wife would have opposed being kept artificially alive under such conditions. When Jeb Bush had milked all of the political capital that he could from the situation, he turned heel and allowed the court decision to go forward unchallenged. So much for being able to count on Jeb Bush's principles!