October 24, 2003

By Nancy Murray, RN

Jacksonville, Florida

In the 1980s, I was working as a Registered Nurse at St. Vincent's Catholic Hospital, Jacksonville, FL.

A management nurse was soliciting persons to lobby the Florida legislature to have hydration/nutrition considered "extraordinary means" of medical treatment.

I confronted her with the opposing view, that food and water have always been "ordinary" means -- indeed, the right of every human being.

Sadly, the nurse and her constituents won.

What is not known by a large majority of individuals is that -- by signing most living wills, wherein the designation is made not to be "artificially kept alive" -- the signer is giving legal permission to be starved/dehydrated to death.

In the battle for the life of Terri Schiavo, in which I have been involved for over a year, there is a misperception -- fed by a culture-of-death media -- that Terri is comatose, PVS, and hooked up to machines.

None of this is true.

Incidentally, Terri Schiavo did not have a Living Will.

Her husband remembered Terri told him she wouldn't want to live artificially only AFTER he received $1.3 million in a malpractice award -- none of which was spent on Terri.

The Schiavo case represents the unrelenting push by the death peddlers to make euthanasia a constitutionally guaranteed right under privacy laws.

Living Wills are routinely supplied to lawyers for their clients by the Right to Die Society.

The AARP promotes living wills and has a link to the pro-euthanasia Partnership for Caring.

Take a look at the Partnership's statement on Physician-Assisted Suicide. It is most revealing.

A person may have every right to say they do not want to live "hooked up to machines."

But I wonder how many of us that are old enough to have seen the pictures of Nazi death camps, would say, 'Please starve me to death?'