The Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation: If You Are a Pro-Life Doctor or Lawyer,or If You Know Someone Who Is, We Need Your Help!

It doesn't get much more direct than that, but desperate times call for desperate pleas. Every day the Terri Schindler Schiavo Foundation receives calls from people whose loved ones are in danger of being killed because their lives don't measure up to the arbitrary standards set by hospital "ethics" committees.

And we at the Foundation know the heartache and the desperation and the fear that stalks families when loved ones are imperiled. Terri died after 14 days without food or fluids, a legal travesty that the foundation is trying to prevent from becoming a routine injustice in hospitals and nursing homes around the nation.

This isn't a "what if" scenario. It is a grim reality that is being played out in the United States of Americaprobably even in your own backyard. Let me offer just a few examples.

Andrea Clark, for example, was 54 and hospitalized with a heart condition. She was on a ventilator but could communicate and was insistent that she wanted to live. Her sisters contacted us, desperate to find a doctor and hospital willing to treat her.

The hospital in Houston had decided that Andrea's case was "futile." It didn't matter than Andrea wanted to live, it didn't matter that Andrea's family wanted her to live, and it didn't even matter than Andrea was fully insured.

Mrs. Vo is 63, a Vietnamese immigrant, married to a man who courageously stood up to the Communist regime in his native land, and is now a citizen of the United States. She was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state. Her husband loves her and wishes to care for herher daughter is an emergency room physician who also wants nothing more than to care for her mother as long as she lives.

But a hospital ethics committee thinks it knows better than Mrs. Vo's loved ones. Her case was declared futile and her family was given 10 days to find another facility to treat her before all lifesaving treatment would be cut off.