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Vatican condemns Terri's agony
21/03/2005 19:08 - (SA)
Vatican City - The Roman Catholic Church condemned on Monday legal attempts in the United States to allow a brain-damaged woman to die after 15 years in a semi-vegetative state, saying "the agony of Terri (Schiavo) is the agony of humanity".
"Who can, and on what grounds, decide who should be allowed the 'privilege' of living?" the official Vatican paper L'Osservatore Romano asked rhetorically in a commentary on the case, which has become a political issue addressed personally by US President George W Bush.
"The slow and terrible agony of Terri is today an agony of the meaning of God ... the agony of the love shown by whoever is able to care for whoever is the most vulnerable. It is the agony of humanity," the paper added.
The fate of Schiavo, whose case has sparked an emotional debate over the right to die with dignity, was placed in the hands of a federal judge on Monday, after Bush signed controversial legislation to prolong her life.
Schiavo - who was "on the brink of death from hunger and thirst" - was being denied not just medicine, therapy or palliative treatment, but "for the most elementary reasons of humanism something which would not be refused to the most wretched individual", food and water, the paper said.
Schiavo has been incapacitated since a 1990 cardiac arrest that damaged her brain.
Her feeding tube was removed on Friday after a protracted legal battle that pits her husband Michael Schiavo against her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler. It had been removed and replaced twice before.
Schiavo insists his wife should be allowed to die because she told him prior to her cardiac arrest she would never want to be kept alive artificially.
The Schindlers do not believe him and have questioned his fitness to serve as his wife's guardian.
The case has provoked an emotional debate in the United States where right-to-die legislation is on the books in only one state, and where such issues are generally considered up to states or individuals to decide, not a federal court or national lawmakers.
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