Before we look into House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s history of dealing with his own personal end-of-life issue, let us remember that he referred to the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube as "an act of barbarism".
From Democracy Now!:
Pulling the Plug: Rep. Tom DeLay and Terri Schiavo's Dad Supported Their Own Parent's Right to Die
[In a tragic accident, Tom DeLay’s father] was thrown into a tree, and suffered severe injuries to the right side of his body, his head and his chest. He had had broken ribs. He had internal brain damage.
He was kept alive for about 27 days. He was on a respirator, and the doctors had told the family, according to the people that Sam Verhovek and I talked to, that if he did live, he would most likely be at best in a vegetative state. And the family decided that when his kidneys started to fail, and the question would have been to give him dialysis to keep him going, the family decided not to do that. And they put a do not resuscitate order into his medical record, and he died 27 days after the accident at the Brook Army Medical Center in Texas.
And remembering that DeLay is one of those leading the push for "tort reform":
Subsequent to that, the family filed a lawsuit against the company that -- one of the companies that manufactured the part of the brake that they bought and the other company that had sold it to them, and that's where it's in the records of that lawsuit that most of the details of the accident and -- you know, the story of what happened are there on file down in Texas.
In similar news, how did Bob Schindler, Terri's father, respond when his own mother had pneumonia, failing kindneys and was on a respirator?:
He asked if I put her on a ventilator, does she have a chance of surviving, of coming out of this thing? And apparently, after discussing with the doctors, he decided his mother did not have a chance of a normal life, and so he decided to cut off the ventilator.
