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.