BlogsforTerri Tampa Tribune Advertisement

Read for yourself the advertisement that BlogsforTerri has placed in the Tampa Tribune. I think you'll see why I can't stay silent.

This blog wasn't set up to swim into controversial subjects, much less horrifying ones. I meant to stick to bookselling and history teaching and humor and the research I'm doing for some books I'm working on. I wanted this to be a safe harbor of sorts, someplace to go without fear of bad language or sorry subjects or ugly attitudes. I wanted to be - still want to be - primarily entertaining and educational, a generally painless way to expand horizons, both yours and mine.

But for me Terri's situation is exactly the same as if some mother at a Special Olympics event told her child, "Well, kid, you did all right for a retarded kid, but when I got pregnant I expected you to wind up better than this. So we're going to say it was a nice experiment but it's over."

No, it's worse. It's that mother being approached by someone who says, "But I love her just the way she is. I'll take her," and the mother saying, "No way. She's mine, and I want her dead."

Only, in this case, the person who won't step aside and let love have its day is a husband instead of a mother.

Michael Schiavo keeps saying that the Terri he knew wouldn't have wanted to live like this. But the Terri who exists today, however different she seems from the woman he married, seems to have adapted far better than he has. She smiles at friends, communicates with a limited vocabulary and with pointing and with facial expressions; she responds to strangers with wariness. And, nurses have testified, she has responded to Michael with sobs and cold sweats, and is often more withdrawn for some time after his visits. She is aware. And she has the capacity for happiness; she's proven this when surrounded by people who take the time to tell her stories, play music she likes, or simply brush her hair.

I strongly believe that when a marriage is valid, parents have no right to interfere. I want to be clear on that. In any situation where a husband is striving to give his wife a good life, he has every right to expect protection from interference from in-laws, no matter how well-meaning the in-laws may be. For that matter, in those nightmarish situations where a wife is truly gone and all that is left is a body kept artificially alive while the family gathers, I think the husband has the right to decide when to turn the machinery off.

But this is not that sort of situation. This is a husband with a history of being over-controlling; a husband who has a family by another woman and has announced his intention of marrying that woman once Terri is dead. This is a man who, having the option of putting his injured wife in an apartment set up with a separate room for nurses, instead put her in a hospice and waited for her die. This is a man who was awarded more than a million dollars to pay for rehab for his wife, who has instead spent hand over fist on lawyers who crusade for 'mercy killing'. This is a man who, when nurses tried to do minimal rehab anyway, has yelled at the nurses and threatened them with loss of their jobs. This is a man who shuts off music, and forbids anyone taking his wife out of her little room. This is, in short, a man who has made a disabled woman's world as small, as constricted, as he can. He is being fought by people who want nothing more or less than the chance to make that same disabled woman's world as large and happy as they can.

How hard could it be to give them that chance?