47 minutes ago
LARGO, Fla. (Reuters) - Terri Schiavo, a Florida woman who died in March after a fierce right-to-die battle that involved the U.S. Congress, was severely brain damaged and had no hope of recovery, said a medical examiner who gave the results of an autopsy on Wednesday.
"Her brain was profoundly atrophied," Pinellas County medical examiner Jon Thogmartin told a news conference, adding that her brain weighed about half what a healthy human brain weighs. "This damage was irreversible."
Schiavo, who suffered a cardiac arrest in 1990 that deprived her brain of oxygen, died at a Florida hospice on March 31, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed by court order. She was 41.
Thogmartin said Schiavo died of dehydration and did not starve to death.
She had been in what courts ruled was a "persistent vegetative state," which means she was unable to think, feel, or interact with her environment since her collapse 15 years previously.
The courts sided with her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, in ruling she would not have wanted to live like that. But her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, said she responded to them and could recover with treatment.
The Schindlers waged a seven-year legal battle to keep her alive, a cause that rallied the Christian right and prompted President Bush and the Republican-led Congress to rush through legislation giving the federal courts jurisdiction to intervene.
Those courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, declined to order the feeding tube be reinserted.