Michael Schiavo, husband of the late Terri Schiavo, lashed out Wednesday against what he calls a “disgusting” pro-life ad to air in South Carolina that uses her image, saying: “Shame on Jeb Bush.”
The 30-second Right to Rise USA super PAC ad shows the image of Schiavo, a Florida woman who was in a vegetative state, within a collage of other images. The narrator praises former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, saying he is “a man of deep faith who fought time and again for the right to life.”
She died at age 41 on March 31, 2005, after a long and ugly public legal battle between her husband and her parents.
Even the Vatican weighed in on the decision to remove her feeding tube. Mr. Schiavo wanted to remove the feeding tube and claimed it was her wish, and her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her siblings did not.
Mr. Bush, who was the governor at the time, issued an executive order to keep Schiavo on life support.
“It is simply disgusting that Jeb Bush and his super PAC would exploit my wife’s tragedy for his crude political gain. Shame on Jeb Bush,” Mr. Schiavo told Buzzfeed News.
“Using his disgraceful intervention in our family’s private trauma to advance his political career shows that he has learned nothing. He’s proud of the fact that he used the machinery of government to keep a person alive through extraordinary artificial means — contrary to the orders of the court that were based on the court’s determination, made over six years of litigation, that doing so would be against her wishes,” he said.
“What the campaign video shows is that if he ever got his hands on the power of government again, he would do the same thing again, maybe next time to your family,” Mr. Schiavo said.
When Mr. Schiavo’s wife died, “she missed eight years of litigation, decisions by 19 state judges, 30,000 pages of court documents, votes in the Florida Legislature and Congress…,” the St. Petersburg Times reported.
Right to Rise hasn’t responded to Mr. Schiavo’s criticisms.
• Maria Stainer can be reached at mstainer@washingtontimes.com.
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