The fight over the right of a severely brain-damaged Florida woman to live or die raged on Saturday, a day after the feeding tube that sustained her for 15 years was removed. "Terri's nutrition and hydration have now been withheld from her," the Terri Schindler-Schiavo Foundation said in a statement on its website.
The move came after lawmakers in Washington issued a subpoena for the severely disabled woman and others involved in the case to appear for testimony before Congress, in an attempt to delay the food cut-off. The subpoena was thrown out Friday by the Florida judge who has routinely ruled that the 41-year-old Schiavo would not want to live with a feeding tube, as her husband maintains.
Attorneys for the US House of Representatives appealed to the Supreme Court, but justices of the highest US court denied the appeal late Friday. Schiavo, left in a vegetative state after her heart stopped in 1990, inflicting severe brain damage, remained alive in a Florida hospice. Experts have said that without food and liquid, she will die in about two weeks.
Doctors have said her condition is irreversible and her husband, Michael Schiavo, says his wife told him she would not want to be kept alive artificially.
But Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, who have fought years to keep their daughter alive, insist that she can hear and understand them, that her condition could improve with proper treatment, and that they are ready to take over her care.
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