WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Sam Brownback today joined the parents and siblings of Terri Schiavo to launch the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to ensuring the rights of disabled, elderly, and vulnerable citizens against care-rationing, euthanasia, and medical killing.
“We must protect the rights of our disabled, elderly, and vulnerable citizens against euthanasia and medical killing,” said Senator Brownback. “Today, one day before the one-year anniversary of Terri’s death, I applaud the launch of the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation, which will focus on advocating for the right to life of individuals with disabilities.”
On March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo died of starvation because her feeding tube had been removed approximately two weeks earlier.
Brownback continued, “Terri’s plight highlighted the core question about the protection of human life: does the dignity with which we treat individuals depend on their physical or mental status as human beings? If a person’s dignity depends only on his or her physical status, then life and death decisions about the most vulnerable among us become relative matters to be determined by doctors, judges, lawyers, and legislatures. Once we go down the path of valuing some lives more than others, of saying that people with disabilities don’t have the same dignity and right to life as others, there are very few means not justified by the sinister end of a disability-free society. The way a society treats individuals with disabilities is a measure of the greatness of that society.”