Terri Schiavo died, after being denied food and water for 13 days.

Blogs for Terri is still up and running and offering information and analysis.

Prolife Blogs has many of the same posts, but more on other issues as well.

Fr. Rob Johansen has a piece in NRO today:

It is clear now that the battle to protect the lives of people like Terri is best won at the very outset — by amassing the best scientific and medical evidence to support the position that even lives that seem profoundly limited are nonetheless worthwhile and human. Ultimately, this is a battle for people’s hearts and minds: Once people understand that there is hope in life, even when that life is limited or entails suffering, they will be unwilling to embrace death as a solution to problems. In the end, the struggle to protect the lives of people like Terri Schiavo is a battle of hope against despair.

Fr. Frank Pavone’s open letter to Michael Schiavo, which many of you have already read, I’m sure.

Yesterday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation featured (separate) interviews with Michael Schiavo and Jay Seklulow. I didn’t listen, but I just read the transcript, and there is nothing surprising there – a total lack of hard questions beind directed Schiavo’s way, which is what we’ve come to expect.

The most irritating thing about these discussions over the past week or so has been the absence of specificity about the issue at hand, which is not prolonging life or artificial life support. The issue was nutrition and hydration for a human being who was breathing on her own, and so on. No one made the distinction last year, and the issues are not being stated forthrightly this year, either.

I’ll quote just a couple of interesting bits from Sekulow’s part of the NPR interview:

CONAN: The autopsy after Terri Schiavo’s death seemed to scientifically, medically supported Michael Schiavo’s point that she was in a persistent vegetative state. There was no hope that any rehabilitation would’ve helped her. Has that changed anybody’s mind do you think?

Mr. SEKULOW: I don’t think it really has, because the really, the issue was not, was Terri, and I know there was all kinds, I call that the chatter on the side was the actual condition it was in. I would’ve, if I was litigating that case, I would’ve said look, there’s nothing, David Boyce made the same, we were on the same side of this position. This was a disabilities case. She was, at a minimum, severely disabled, most severely disabled. And her brain function was either zero or minimal.

But she was breathing on her own, and in a sleep cycle, and that made all of us that are concerned about these kind of cases nervous that you start intervening in this way and I think that you have to, I find it interesting and I’ve seen some of the interviews that have taken place, of Terri’s husband, and when he talks about that he held his wife, talking about Terri, and said goodbye to her, I don’t know if he did that more for himself and his own, you know, well being, or whether he thought he was communicating with Terri. I thought that was an interesting thought, saw the interview with Matt Lauer the other day and I found that to be fascinating.

But look, without, I don’t want to challenge anybody’s motives. I think here’s what you had at the end of the day. You had a situation that was unique in American jurisprudence, and that was you had a conflicted guardian who had another family. And I think what the court should have done in that case was deferred, on caution, on the side of life, regardless of the status of the medical situation at that point. And her parents were willing to take over the guardian and custody of their daughter, and I still to this day don’t understand why he didn’t let that happen. His answer is he knew Terri’s wishes, but, you know, in a case like this, when you’ve got such an, to me, an apparent conflict, it would’ve been just much simpler and more civil to have gone the other way.

The disability-rights organization Not Dead Yet issued a statement on the anniversary:

Even though at least 26 national disability groups expressed concern over apparent violations of civil rights and guardianship laws in the withholding of food and fluids from Terri Schiavo, the ‘culture war’ framework imposed by others carried the day and still dominates the discussion," says research analyst Stephen Drake. "Players as diverse as Howard Dean, Randall Terry, Fox News and the New York Times all seem invested in making the public forget that the debate around Schiavo was never a simple right-left controversy." Drake pointed out that in addition to national disability groups, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader and Senator Tom Harkin all expressed concern about Schiavo’s death and about people in similar situations.

"The media, pundits and demagogues have all but erased that complexity from the public consciousness," says Drake.

In the year since Ms. Schiavo"s death, even more disability organizations have joined in a Statement of Common Principles developed by the national disability groups that filed three amicus curiae briefs in the Schiavo case. The Statement (online at http://thechp.syr.edu/endorse/) sets out principles to guide a guardian’s decisions with respect to life sustaining medical treatment. "We see many indications that managed care, government funded health care providers and overburdened courts have ignored constitutional principles that we used to take for granted, threatening millions of old, ill and disabled Americans who are endangered on many fronts," added Diane Coleman, president of Not Dead Yet.