Terri Schiavo's feeding tube removed

It was six years ago, on March 18, 2005, that the feeding tube which provided sustenance to 41-year-old Terri
Schiavo was removed. As the world watched, she was forced to dehydrate to death over the next 13 days.

The disconnected feeding tube heralded victory for Schiavo's estranged husband, Michael Schiavo, in his 11-year
court battle with her parents and siblings over her life. The latter fought to preserve it.

In what some legal minds decry as "judicial homicide," the Florida circuit court judge who ordered the feeding
tube removed went even further in his ruling by barring Schiavo from receiving any oral hydration or nutrition.
Guards stood near Schiavo's hospice bedside to ensure that not so much as an ice chip touched her lips.

Contrary to widespread media reports, Schiavo was neither brain dead, dying, in a coma nor kept alive
artificially by machines. The brain-injured woman breathed on her own and appeared to be cognitively responsive in
video taken during court-ordered neurological evaluations in 2002.

The medical examiner who performed an autopsy on her estimated Schiavo would have lived another decade if she
had not been dehydrated to death.

In 1990 Schiavo suffered a brain injury at the age of 26 when she mysteriously collapsed in the Florida apartment she shared with her husband.

Upon surfacing from a weeks-long coma, Schiavo progressed in rehabilitative therapy to the point of speaking
isolated words, according to her caregivers. Shortly thereafter Michael Schiavo, who served as the incapacitated
woman's legal guardian, halted the rehabilitation and transferred her to a nursing home.

She spent the last five years of her life in hospice.

In 1995 Michael Schiavo hired a prominent right-to-die attorney and filed a motion to remove the feeding tube to
precipitate his wife's death, based on newly recollected conversations in which she allegedly expressed the wish to
die if ever dependent on life support. Schiavo's family disputed the alleged statements.

Debate continued beyond her death over the extent of brain damage Schiavo suffered, whether she was in a
persistent vegetative state, or PVS, and the prognosis for treatment.

Schiavo acquired the PVS label in the original trial in 1999 when her family agreed to stipulate she was in PVS.
Only after doing so, the family learned the PVS diagnosis was the lynchpin in the court battle because Florida law
changed while Schiavo's case was pending to allow the removal of medical treatment from people specifically in PVS.

When the family appealed in 2002, a court-appointed neurologist sided with two neurologists solicited by Michael
Schiavo's attorney in concurring with the PVS diagnosis, out-voting the two neurologists who testified Schiavo was
not in PVS.

Since then dozens of neurologists and other medical and therapeutic professionals studied the videotaped
evaluations and concluded Schiavo was not in PVS, but rather minimally conscious, or MCS. Schiavo's family provided
sworn testimonies from 41 such professionals to the
court to block the removal of her feeding tube, to no avail.

One stunning observation offered by a noted neurologist with the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. James Gebel, in an
editorial first posted on WFTSradio.com April 28, 2005, "The parts of Terri Schiavo's brain which would allow her
to perceive pain, her thalami, were clearly intact and visible on her CT scan images" and "the parts of Terri
Schiavo's brain which would allow her to experience discomfort and/or pain due to hunger were undamaged."

In other words, Schiavo was able to experience the full extent of pain associated with fatal dehydration.

It was also on March 18, 2005, that members of the U.S. Congress took the unprecedented steps of attempting to
intervene on Schiavo's behalf.

In the hours before the feeding tube was removed, the House Government Reform Committee launched an
investigation and issued subpoenaes for Terri and Michael Schiavo, her physician and hospice staff to testify at a
committee field hearing on March 25, 2005.

The doctors and hospice staff were ordered not to remove the feeding tube and to keep her alive until the
completion of their investigation.

At the same time the Senate Health Committee likewise requested Terri and Michael Schiavo appear at an official
Committee hearing to be held 10 days later.

The committees petitioned the court to postpone the removal of the feeding tube. But the circuit court judge who
ordered the feeding tube removed, Judge George Greer, quashed the subpoenas.

Two days later, President George W. Bush would fly back from his ranch in Crawford, Texas, specifically to sign
a law debated and passed on Palm Sunday by both houses of Congress to save Schiavo, again, to no avail.

The plight of Terri Schiavo came to the attention of the nation and the world in a Nov. 13, 2002 story by WND news editor Diana
Lynne. It would be the first of nearly 500 stories published by
WND, ultimately elevating to the No. 1 story in the nation and the world, as millions followed the conclusion
to her court-ordered dehydration death on March 31, 2005.

Lynne was so moved by her involvement in the story, she later authored "Terri's Story: The Court-Ordered Death of an
American Woman" for WND Books.

WND is the oldest and largest independent Internet news-gathering agency, founded in May 1997. It has been the
source of many of the biggest stories in the nation and world during the last 14 years.

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