Brain-Damaged Woman’s Feeding Tube Removed

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. Mar 18, 2005 — With a furious legal and political battle raging outside her hospice room, doctors removed Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube Friday after an unprecedented attempt by Congress to keep the brain-damaged woman alive was rebuffed.

The feeding tube was removed from Terri Schiavo, the woman at the heart of a long and furious right-to-die battle, at 1:45 p.m. (1845 GMT) and she was expected to die in seven to 14 days.

Her husband’s lawyer called the last-minute attempt by U.S. congressional Republicans to keep the tube in place “nothing short of thuggery” and called Democrats “spineless” for failing to thwart it.

Schiavo has been fed through a stomach tube since a heart attack starved her brain of oxygen in 1990, leaving her in what the courts declared was a permanent vegetative state.

Her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, said she would not have wanted to live in that condition and won permission to remove the feeding tube.

He was not present in his wife’s room at the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, when the feeding tube was removed in what his lawyer, George Felos, described as a “very calm” and prayerful procedure. But her husband was at her bedside later, Felos said.

Republican congressional leaders made the last-minute bid to keep the feeding tube in place by subpoenaing Terri Schiavo to appear before hearings and committees later in the month, a move that would have granted her protection as a witness in a congressional inquiry.
Congressional Republicans like House Majority Leader Tom DeLay say they acted to save Terri Schiavo’s life. “All I know is Terri is alive, and this judge in Florida wants to pull her feeding tube and let her starve for two weeks. That is barbaric,” he said.

The family is still hoping for a long-shot legal victory to have the tube re-inserted.

Several right-to-die cases across the nation have been fought in the courts in recent years, but few, if any, have been this drawn-out and bitter.