Whatever the results of the Medical Examiner's (ME's) report may indicate about the condition of Terri Schiavo at the time of her death, we know from the mainstream media's hyped reporting that America's leading news outlets and reporters are mindlessly ill-informed, wilfully blind, thoroughly unprincipled, and miserably unschooled in the basic principles of medicine, the scientific method and statistics.

The news reports that the liberal media spewed-out on the Schiavo autopsy reveal little or nothing about whether Terri was braindead, blind, and incapable of feeling pleasure or pain. But they certainly yield insights into the sorry intellectual, moral and politicized state of the liberal media as well as the armies of medical and legal experts who prostitute themselves by shamelessly dispensing legally unsound and medically unsupported misinformation and disinformation without adequately informing themselves on the facts of the case.

Sanger reviews the remedies for dealing with a nation half filled with "morons" and finds them all wanting. She reserves her greatest scorn, of course, for the traditional. The Catholic Church's claim that even deformed children have souls, she argues, has had "the practical effect of making this world a vale of tears." To "open-minded" individuals - presumably, like herself- such orthodoxy appears "crude and cruel" and a "menace to civilization."

Traditional philanthropy, if anything, is crueler still. "Organized charity," writes Sanger, "itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease." By keeping so many "defectives, delinquents and dependents" alive and breeding, charity at some point becomes an injustice for the self-supporting citizen and a "positive injury to the future of the race." Indeed, students of Sanger could not have been surprised by the massive progressive indifference to the torture and death of Terri Schiavo. The seed of that indifference has been deeply planted.

Sanger's American Birth Control League and its allies had enormous influence in their day. In 1927, in a now notorious case known as Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court accepted the state of Virginia's ruling that Carrie Buck and her infant daughter were mentally defective and thus deserving of forced sterilization.

Such grisly details were revealed in Ogden's first study, in which 17 individuals, including doctors, nurses, counselors, social workers and two priests, told him precisely how they had helped AIDS patients kill themselves. But the biggest surprise was that many of these deaths were not the "good deaths" often described in proeuthanasia books, which tend to romanticize the process. Of the 34 euthanasia cases, Ogden found that half were botched and ultimately resulted in increased suffering. In five situations, suffocation was unsuccessful. In one instance, the individual who assisted in the suicide had to resort to shooting the patient--in another, to slitting his wrists with a razor blade. These failed attempts often led to the acts of euthanasia taking several hours or longer to complete; in one case, it took four days for the person to die.

In 1993 Congress passed a law, signed by Bill Clinton, that stipulated that the President could not stop the NIH from funding research using tissue from surgically aborted babies. Not that Clinton _wanted_ to stop such funding, mind you. But he liked the idea of making it hard for later Presidents to stop it. However, during the Clinton administration Congress also (paradoxically) banned funding for research that destroyed unimplanted embryos. All the focus in the news now is on funding for destructive embryo research. Bush compromised a bit with his "August 9, 2001" speech when he first took office, but there are still restrictions on federal funding for this research, and the lefties are clamoring for it to be fully funded. But all the while, due to the 1993 law, Bush's NIH funds research using tissue from surgically aborted babies with no limit to tissue from children killed before any particular date.

Many pro-lifers don't even know about this. Some are under the impression that all the furor about embryo research applies to fetal tissue research as well.

In 2002, the Family Research Council brought the fetal tissue funding by Bush's NIH to light and criticized it. Read about it HERE.

National Right to Life had said nothing about the NIH funding during Bush's administration. Once it came out independently, their greatest concern was to defend Bush, saying there was nothing he could do about it because of the 1993 law...

Here is NRLC's own piece on the matter. It appears that they are right insofar as the 1993 law does prevent Bush from stopping such funding immediately by his own personal action.

But the Family Research Council had pointed out, relevantly enough, that if he could do nothing else, President Bush could at least ask Congress to change the law. It seemed to some (as mentioned in the article at the Priests for Life site) that there were not then enough congressional votes to pass a new ban on such funding, or even to shift the funding to the president's discretion, but it is hard to believe that it would not have been worth trying for such a change. NRLC had pressed for bills banning or limiting fetal tissue research funding during the Clinton administration. Surely in 2000 or 2002, with a supportive President, there would be even more hope of passage. President Bush has twisted congressional arms on many issues where conservatives disagree with him; it seems entirely plausible that he could have gotten his way here. But he has never once, so far as I can tell, asked Congress either to ban this funding or even to return discretion for such a ban to him.

the pictures drawn by children who fled the oppression illustrate the horror as vividly as any photograph.

One depicts people fleeing their burning village; another shows a half-naked woman about to be raped by soldiers; yet another has a baby dumped in a rice pounder while villagers are killed.

The drawings are from a batch made by children aged 10 to 15 at Umpien refugee camp in Thailand.

Dr Martin Panter, international president of Christian Solidarity Worldwide, which has campaigned on the Burmese issue for years and recently reported evidence that the Burmese junta had used chemical weapons, said the children were given pencils and paper and asked to paint whatever they liked.

"I said it might help to draw painful things, but nothing else. Some drew typical flowers and harmless village scenes but two thirds produced images of these terrible experiences.

"Some had seen their mothers raped, or children killed. They played and looked like normal children but with this great burden of pain."

It's not torture if:

The same acts performed on a live stage have been favorably reviewed by Frank Rich of the New York Times;

Andrew Sullivan has ever solicited it from total strangers on the Internet;

You can pay someone in New York to do it to you;

Karen Finley ever got a federal grant to do it;

It's comparable to the treatment U.S. troops received in basic training;

It's no worse than the way airlines treat little girls in pigtails flying to see Grandma.

Some of the attackers -- members of Arab militias that allied themselves with the government's campaign against the two regional rebel groups -- lurk around the camps. According to refugees and aid workers, any man who wanders far from the camps in search of firewood is likely to be killed. Many families choose to send women to fetch firewood. Although several women also have been killed, they are more likely "only" to be raped.

The government in Khartoum has been condemned internationally for its scorched-earth policies, which many have called genocide. What is clear for many in Darfur is that rape has been used systematically as a tool of war.

"The women in these camps come from villages that were attacked, and they watched their husbands and fathers and sons be slaughtered. When the attackers were done with the men, they raped the women, even the old ones. Then the women ran away and came here to the camps, but if they leave the camp to get firewood they're captured and raped by force again.

Local authorities in Darfur have done little to stop the sexual assaults on displaced women, many here have said.

"The women go to the police, but the police don't record these things in their papers," Ahmed told Catholic News Service . "They tell the women they won't help them because they allegedly fight against the government. They simply won't help them. Unless they see an attack on a woman right in front of them, they let them do what they want."

In March, The Empire Journal learned that Mark Dubina, special agent and supervisor with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) had charged that he was told to "shut down" his investigation into the Schiavo case, to close his file and turn it in. He says that McCabe allegedly ordered that all criminal investigations in regard to the Schiavo matter, including the FDLE investigation, be shut down. Such an alleged obstruction of justice would appear to be grounds for a federal investigation of McCabe and the Pinellas County state attorney's office.

So where is Dubina now? Gov. Bush told reporters Friday, June 17 when he made his request to McCabe for an investigation that "I have not seen or heard of this information before that there's some doubt about when she did collapse and how long it took for a phone call to be made. That is I think, worthy of some investigation".

Gov Bush appointed  Dubina to his post as primary FDLE investigator and director for the Tampa Bay Region Domestic Security Task Force  by Bush after the 9-11 terrorist attacks.  Dubina who is a certified fraud examiner would supervise all security operations for the Governor upon any visits to the Tampa Bay area and as such, would have direct contact with the Governor.

This would certainly seem to indicate that Dubina would have briefed and advised the Governor about the Schiavo case, creating serious doubt about Bush's veracity in his statements that he had no prior knowledge of the discrepancies and allegations surrounding the incidents of Feb. 25, 1990.

a sick desire to go to work with a gun, go downstairs to the bathroom in the basement...the one that A and I first fucked in...the night i threw my marriage away. go in with a gun. sit on the floor. scrawl a quick note in eyeliner. he is bartending upstairs...it's saturday night. note: "A___, thanks for the abortion. i'm sorry i didn't take the opportunity to make my life better. my dreams died that day. i didn't predict the hopelessness i would feel. no matter what you think of me, i love you. j___." and then put the loaded gun in my mouth, angled upwards, pull the trigger. head blown apart, brains everywhere, right where it all began...with my eyes open, so i can see the very end, the last moment.

I recently received an email from a concerned individual who obviously disagrees with our conclusions about abortion. His message read in part:

"Abortion is not murder in my eyes because I see a very distinct difference between a fetus and a grown human being. Killing someone who has had real life experiences and a sentient mind is far worse than one who has neither (I'm not talking about when brain waves occur in pregnancy, I'm talking about awareness of and understanding of the world). This is why I support legislation against murder but not abortion. No matter how inefficient, allowing what constitutes traditional murder is simply destructive to society, much in the same way that outlawing abortion would be destructive (or at the very least, nonconstructive) to society.

The main reason I'm pro-choice is because I don't think banning abortion is the best way to stop it (just like gun control, just like the war on drugs, two miserable failures in my opinion) and because abortion is compassionate in the sense that right now the world sucks and so do the people in it.

The best way to stop something is to remove the incentive for it. With abortion: Women get abortions because they don't feel ready to raise a child or don't wan't it.'

In order to claim protection under the Geneva Conventions , participants must fight wearing a recognisable uniform or badge, fight under officers who can be held responsible for them, carry their weapons openly, and -- perhaps most important -- fight according to the rules of war laid out in the Geneva Conventions themselves. The Geneva Conventions are not meant to be a handicap to decent people -- they're meant to be a deterrent to keep rogue nations from breaking those rules. If one side of a conflict decides not to fight according to Geneva Conventions, then they forfeit their protection as well. The two are locked together -- that's the rules. Yet Liberals continue to claim that we -- not the terrorists who deliberately murder innocents -- are uninterested in laws and human rights.

We're all for human rights, more than any other country has ever been in the entire history of mankind. But we're fighting an enemy who isn't. We're fighting an enemy that has gladly used their own children as suicide bombers, and deliberately targets children. We're fighting an enemy that will settle for nothing less than total global domination by their twisted version of Islam. We're fighting an enemy that cannot be bought off or reasoned with. Note to Liberals: if you want to play patty-cake with those inhuman barbaric bastards, gamble with your own life. Don't do it with mine, or those of my friends and family.

We have seen a lot on the autopsy of Terri Schindler Schiavo in recent days, that I feel needs to be addressed. To ignore these comments will allow future 'Terri Schiavo's' to die needlessly after the wishes of clinicians and family are ignored.

Considering that there were so many physicians and therapists who were willing to step forward to treat Terri Schiavo, from university based practitioners to those in private practice, it clearly shows that the mainstream medical community across the board, those involved in treating patients, knew that they could help Terri.

The record must be set straight. As we noted in the press, there was no heart attack, or evident reason for this to have happened (and certainly not of Terri's making).

Unlike the constant drumbeat from the husband, his attorneys, and his doctors, the brain tissue was not dissolved, with a head of just spinal fluid. In fact, large areas were "relatively preserved."

The purpose of the therapies offered by so many, from major universities, brain injury centers, and from private practice physicians, is to improve and restore quality of life, and function, which the mainstream medical community clearly tried to get to her.

I have had a chance to look at Dr. Nelson's analysis of the brain tissue, and essentially, as a clinician, these are my thoughts.

The autopsy results confirmed my opinion and Dr. Maxfield's opinions, that the frontal areas of the brains, the areas that deal with awareness and cognition were relatively intact. To use Dr. Nelson's words, "relatively preserved." In fact, the relay areas from the frontal and front temporal regions of the brain, to the spinal cord and the brain stem, by way of the basal ganglia, were preserved, thus the evident responses which she was able to express to her family and to the clinicians seeing her or viewing her videotape. The Spect scan confirmed these areas were functional and not scar tissue, and that was apparently also confirmed on Dr. Nelson's review of the slides. Dr. Maxfield's estimates of retained brain weight were apparently accurate, although there may have been some loss of brain weight due to the last two weeks of dehydration.

Dr. Maxfield and myself both emphasized that she was a woman trapped in her body, similar to a child with cerebral palsy, and that was borne out by the autopsy, showing greater injury in the motor and visual centers of the brain. Obviously, the pathologists comments that she could not see were not borne out by reality, and thus his assessment must represent sampling error. The videotapes clearly showed her seeing, and even Dr. Cranford, for the husband, commented to her that, when she could see the balloon, she could follow it with her eyes as per his request.

That she could not swallow was obviously not borne out by the reality that she was swallowing her saliva, about 1.5 liters per day of liquid, and the clinical swallowing tests done by Dr. Young and Dr. Carpenter. Thus, there appears to be some limitations to the clinical accuracy of an autopsy in evaluating function.

With respect to the issue of trauma, that certainly does not appear to be answered adequately. Some of the types of trauma that are suspected were not adequately evaluated in this assessment. Interestingly, both myself and at least one neurologist for the husband testified to the presence of neck injuries. The issue of a forensic evaluation for trauma, is highly specialized. Hence the wish of the family to have observers which was refused by the examiner.

Ultimately, based on the clinical evidence and the autopsy results, an aware woman was killed.

The senator's humanitarian impulse toward terror suspects seems curious, given his efforts to protect abortionists' "right" to haul fully formed children out of the womb up to their necks, pierce their skulls, suck out their brains and extract the dead bodies.

There is no plausible medical reason to justify this cruelty. In 1996, more than 600 physicians, including former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, issued this statement: "Never is the partial-birth abortion procedure medically indicated." Not to save the life of the mother, nor to protect the health of the mother. By the time you get to virtually birthing the child, there is no excuse for killing him or her.

The American Medical Association concurred and endorsed the legislative ban Sen. Durbin couldn't bring himself to support. To what we can only assume was Sen. Durbin's relief, a federal judge in Nebraska struck down the law within an hour after President Bush signed it on Nov. 5, 2003.

"It's important that they promote this euthanasia agenda," Bobby said of the media coverage. "If you look at the way they handled my sister's case, they justified killing her."

The media's bias is "evidence of where we've come as a society - that we're perfectly okay defining someone as profoundly brain damaged and killing that person. We're starving people to death for the simple reason that they are brain damaged. Where is the compassion in that?"

"It places more suspicion on Michael Schiavo than before," he said. "We've seen this for a long time now - everyone is concerned about Terri' condition and killing her because she not longer has any value for society, but they don't care what put her there in the first place."

Bobby said the public should be asking "some serious questions about what is going on here - he is the only one that knows what happened."

"It's been tough... You need to have faith in God and Christ because if you don't you're going to be steering without a rudder."

"There is so much evil in this world. If you don't put your faith in God, then at the end if can really consume you."

Bush said Thursday that he had talked to Dr. Jon Thogmartin, the Pinellas-Pasco medical examiner, a day before Thogmartin publicly released the results of his autopsy on Terri Schiavo, who died on March 31 after a protracted legal and political battle.

Bush said Thogmartin told him he had gained access to information suggesting that there was a 70-minute delay between when Michael Schiavo first heard a ''bump'' in the early morning hours of Feb. 25, 1990 and when he eventually called 911.

''I have not seen or heard of this information before that there's some doubt about when she did collapse and how long it took for a phone call to be made,'' Bush told reporters. "That is I think, worthy of some investigation."

Jason Torres said doctors believe the fetus could have a chance if Susan Torres lives another month and her cancer stays away from her uterus.

He said he decided to keep his wife on life support when doctors at Virginia Hospital Center offered him the chance to disconnect the machines after concluding she would not recover.

"I hate seeing her on those darned machines, and I hate using her as a husk, a carrying case, because she herself is worth so much more,'" Torres said in an interview in Thursday's USA Today. "But Susan really wanted this baby. And she's a very - how should I put this? - a willful lady. That's probably why she's made it this far.''

Susan Torres, a 26-year-old researcher at the National Institutes of Health, lost consciousness from a stroke May 7 after aggressive melanoma spread to her brain. Jason Torres said doctors told him his wife's brain functions have stopped.

Torres said the fetus appears to be thriving, but his wife's doctors have told him they know of no cases in which a brain-dead mother with melanoma has delivered a baby.

Vitadamo disputed the notion she said appears in media stories abou Terri that her sister would not have wanted to live in her incapacitated condition or to be the victim of euthanasia.

"There is absolutely no evidence that Terri wanted to die of dehydration, or that she believed that that the level of one's disability gives anyone the moral and legal right to end another's life," Vitadamo said.

"Terri was dehydrated to death before our eyes. The moral shame of what happened is not erased because of Terri's level of disability," she added.

Vitadamo said that society has "lost our compassion for the disabled" by virtue of saying people who are blind or mentally disabled, like Terri, are better off dying.

Terri's sister pointed out some of the key findings of the report that she indicated corroborated some of the things the Schindler family asserted throughout the legal battle. They included:

* Terri had a strong heart and was likely capable of living for a decade or more had she not been starved. Terri's condition was not terminal.

* Terri had injuries to her brain, but she was not brain dead. "Many seem to not understand this absolutely critical distinction."

* The medical report ruled out bulimia and heart attack as a cause of Terri's condition, leaving potential physical abuse on the list of possibilities.

* Vitadamo said the report leaves a 70-minute gap between the time Teri collapsed and the time her estranged husband Michael called 911. "The major question for our family that now remains is what happened," she said. "When a person is without blood and oxygen to their brain, 70 minutes is a terribly long time when each second counts."

* Vitadamo questioned how Terri could have been found lying face down on the floor with her hands crossed and up high against her chest.

* Vitadamo said the underlying basis of the malpractice case has been disproved with the autopsy ruling out bulimia as the cause of the collapse. "Our family would encourage Michael Schiavo to do the right thing and return the funds that were paid by the innocent doctors who were sued for Terri's collapse," she said.

* Terri's sister also asked Michael to tell the Schindler family his plans for Terri's remains so they can give her a proper burial.

* She indicated that the report showed Terri would not be able to eat and drink on her own and said the Schindler family wasn't surprised because she had been denied therapy for twelve years.

* She pointed out that Dr. William Cheshire, a neurologist from the Mayo Clinic, agree with the Schindler family that Terri was awake and aware and at least somewhat cognitive.

* Vitadamo said they knew Terri was visually impaired, Terri clearly saw friends and family, and that Terri could have lost her eyesight during the starvation.

* She said that it appeared contradictory that Terri was given morphine and yet the autopsy claims Terri was unable to feel pain because of her mental condition.

Vitadamo closed and reaffirmed the Schindler family's commitment to fighting for the rights of disabled people.

"Our prayer at this time is that our Nation will remember the plight of persons with disabilities and commit within our hearts to defend their lives and their dignity for many generations to come," she said.

.. the anoxic brain injury sustained by Terri Schiavo on Feb. 25, 1990, was caused by lack of blood flow and oxygen to her brain but that the cause of that condition could not be detected and was undetermined. He did not rule out that the injuries could have been caused by smothering.

He said that there was no evidence of bulimia and the assumption of bulimia presented at the medical malpractice trial had simply been accepted and not challenged. He said there was absolutely nothing to support the theory of bulimia as presented by Michael's attorneys. He also ruled out the 15-year fallacy presented by the mainstream media that she had sustained a heart attack, saying that her collapse was the result of an "external problem outside of the heart causing the heart not to beat". He said there was no evidence that she had had any heart problems prior to her collapse and said that the fact she lived 15 years after her resuscitation was testimony to the strength of her heart.

Thogmartin further disputed the potassium inbalance caused by purging and bulimia theory perpetuated by the mainstream media saying there was absolutely no evidence of such...The medical examiner said that she had incurred massive neuronal damage and that no amount of therapy or treatment would have replaced the lost neurons.

Terri Schiavo's autopsy results confirm what was feared - she was disabled, and her death was due to the deliberate denial of hydration," said Wendy Wright, CWA's senior policy director. "The autopsy report described Terri's medical history and condition in detail, but the cold reality of the truth is that her cause of death was 'dehydration'. Terri Schiavo died because the court ordered the removal of the instrument that provided her water.

"There is no medical condition or disability that should ever be championed as a justifiable reason to deny water to a human being. Every human life has worth and a purpose apart from its 'merit' to society that must be vigorously defended and upheld, not crushed."

"While people may personally dread becoming handicapped, people with disabilities deserve mercy, not malice. Only a calloused society in moral freefall would deny a disabled person her most basic need - water"

Melody: I keep on reading about how you believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, and I was just wondering how someone like Bush fits into that world view... if he does, at all.

Gloria: Well, yeah. He wasn't born that way. As a baby, he probably had a whole person inside him! But that family is enough to turn anybody into a raving power maniac, and they certainly did it with him.

Melody: When I saw the picture, the famous picture of him, with a bunch of other white guys, gleefully signing away our rights as women... all I could think was, "ok, how is that not just pure evil?"

Gloria: Well, you know, there is certainly evil effect. There are certainly going to be millions of women and a lot of men who simply are not alive because he's in the White House. There are going to be whole species of animals, and living things, and plants that are not alive anymore, and will never come back, because: he killed them. So, that's an evil impact. I don't think it's inevitable. He wasn't born that way.