Nightline: Michael Schiavo and George Felos

(Transcript excerpt)

BURY: Your wife's family and their supporters have been arguing in the most graphic terms that what you are going to allow happen on Friday, in their words, is in effect condemning your wife to a cruel death by starvation.

I'd like you to address that charge from them.

SCHIAVO: That's one of their soapboxes they've been on for a long time.

Terry will not be starved to death. Her nutrition and hydration will be taken away. This happens across this country every day.

Death through removing somebody's nutrition is very painless. That has been brought to the courts many of times. Doctors have come in and testified. It is a very painless procedure.

Terry can't — she has no cortex left. She doesn't feel pain. She doesn't feel hunger.

So what's going to happen is slowly — her potassium and her electrolytes will slowly diminish and she will drift off to a nice little sleep and eventually pass on to be with God.
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Michael Schiavo tries to depict Terri's imminent starvation as a peaceful, painless end to her life.

Fact: Starvation is not painless.

In Wesley J. Smith's book, Forced Exit, The Slippery Slope from Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder, he describes the agony of dying by starvation.

"Proponents of dehydration contend that deaths by dehydration are peaceful," Smith wrote.

Noting that "the patients we are discussing are not terminally ill" and that those who are conscious can feel hunger and thirst, Smith quotes Dr. William Burke, a neurologist in St. Louis, who described the agonizing process.

"A conscious person would feel it (dehydration) just as you and I would. They will go into seizures. Their skin cracks, their tongue cracks, their lips crack. They may have nosebleeds because of the drying of the mucous membranes, and heaving and vomiting might ensue because of the drying out of the stomach lining. They feel the pangs of hunger and thirst. Imagine going one day without a glass of water. Death by dehydration takes ten to fourteen days. It is an extremely agonizing death."

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Article 14 of the Geneva protocols states: "It should be noted that even if starvation were not subject to an official legal prohibition, it is nowadays no longer an acceptable phenomenon, irrespective of how it arises [natural disaster or induced by man]."
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Florida Statute 765.309
Mercy killing or euthanasia not authorized; suicide distinguished. Nothing in this chapter shall be construed to condone, authorize, or approve mercy killing or euthanasia, or to permit any affirmative or deliberate act or omission to end life other than to permit the natural process of dying.

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Terri will not die now, unless she is killed.