Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Legislation That Requires Support!
In the months leading up to, and after Terri Schiavo's death, a dozen states took the first legislative steps toward preventing future similar cases. Lawmakers in eight states ? Alabama, Georgia, Hawaii, Iowa, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota and South Carolina ? proposed bills identical to, or inspired by the National Right to Life Committee's Model Starvation and Dehydration of Persons with Disabilities Prevention Act,which was inspired by the 2003 removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.If this law or something like it is not making it's way through your state legislature now - do the hard work of making it happen.
"For years, people who never asked to die have been quietly starved without much public attention, based on state laws and court opinions that permit third parties to make deadly decisions with little or no scrutiny or accountability," said attorney Burke Balch, the director of the NRLC's Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics and the chief architect of the model law. "The outcry over the Schindler-Schiavo case has awakened millions of Americans to the inhumanity of this practice. Now we must act to reverse this trend, and restore a presumption against starvation and dehydration."
The model Act creates a presumption in law that people incapable of expressing their wishes would be given nutrition and hydration, so long as their provision is medically possible, would not itself hasten death, and can be digested or absorbed so as to sustain life.
Related Tags: Schiavo, life presumption
