Her legacy is only growing stronger. 

Four years ago today, Terri Schiavo succumbed after being starved and dehydrated to death by court order. The final days of her ordeal and her family’s ripped into American consciousness when the media no longer had any choice but to cover the story in her last days that some of us had been covering for months in ‘alternative’ media, both print and radio. But the mainstream media never got the story right, and to this day they continue to refer to Terri, but with lies and distortions to advance an agenda that promotes abortion to euthanasia. Because the other thing that was ripped was the fabric of this culture that is now accepting the recently unacceptable, all under the language of ‘rights’.

In the months just before and after Terri’s death, a dozen states took a flurry of legislative steps toward preventing future cases of cognitively impaired patients being killed without due process protection of the Constitution. At the time, lawmakers said publicly that for years, people had been quietly starved to death out of the public spotlight, because of state laws and court opinions that permit third parties to make deadly decisions with little or no scrutiny or accountability. At the time, the outcry over Terri Schiavo’s case awakened millions of Americans to the inhumanity of this practice, and we were determined to reverse the trend to marginalize and eliminate the impaired and disabled, and restore the presumption for life and the respect for human dignity.

Four years out, that legislative attention went away, euthanasia laws are spreading across the country, and the lack of reform in the law is due in part to media negligence. But only in part. It falls on the people to see this reform through, or it’s not going to happen. United, Americans can urge legislators to rewrite laws to protect the disabled and elderly.

Illinois is the place to start, and fast.