The younger brother of Terri Schiavo, whose medical condition launched a lengthy legal battle that captured national attention and generated congressional hearings, discusses his sister’s life in an address at Lawrence University.
Bobby Schindler presents “The Truth About Terri Schiavo: What the Media Didn’t Tell You” Tuesday, April 18 at 4:30 p.m. in Youngchild Hall, Room 121. The event is free and open to the public.
Schindler will discuss his sister’s life, the struggle his family endured in their attempt to save her life, the secular media’s misrepresentations surrounding Schiavo’s life and death as well as the danger and the frequent misdiagnoses of persistent vegetative state. Schiavo, who suffered severe brain damage as the result of a heart attack in her Florida home in 1990, died at the age of 41 on March 31, 2005 after a feeding tube had been removed two weeks earlier.
Shortly after his sister’s death, Schindler began working full time for the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation. The organization, initially founded to help save her life, now provides support to families and persons with disabilities in situations similar to Schiavo’s.
Following her heart attack, Schiavo spent 10 weeks in a coma and was later diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state with little chance of recovery. Her husband, Michael Schiavo, asked the courts in 1998 to remove a gastric feeding tube from his wife, touching off a long and contentious legal fight between Michael Schiavo and Terri’s parents, Robert and Mary Schindler.
Both the state government of Florida and the U.S. Congress eventually became involved in the case. On four different occasions, the U.S. Supreme Court denied petitions to review it.
