Tom DeLay let his own brain-dead father die peacefully in 1988

[scottxyz]

DeLay's Own Tragic Crossroads
By Walter F. Roche Jr. and Sam Howe Verhovek, LA Times Staff Writers

CANYON LAKE, Texas — A family tragedy that unfolded in a Texas hospital during the fall of 1988 was a private ordeal — without judges, emergency sessions of Congress or the debate raging outside Terri Schiavo's Florida hospice.
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More than 16 years ago, far from the political passions that have defined the Schiavo controversy, the DeLay family endured its own wrenching end-of-life crisis. The man in a coma, kept alive by intravenous lines and oxygen equipment, was DeLay's father, Charles Ray DeLay.
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"There was no point to even really talking about it," Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old widowed mother, recalled in an interview last week. "There was no way {Charles, Tom DeLay's father} wanted to live like that. Tom knew — we all knew — his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."
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When his father's kidneys failed, the DeLay family decided against connecting him to a dialysis machine. "Extraordinary measures to prolong life were not initiated," said his medical report, citing "agreement with the family's wishes." His bedside chart carried the instruction: "Do not resuscitate."
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{Although food and water alone would NOT have kept DeLay's father "alive"} there were also these similarities {with the Schiavo case}: Both stricken patients were severely brain-damaged. Both were incapable of surviving without medical assistance. Both were said to have expressed a desire to be spared from being kept alive by artificial means. And neither of them had a living will.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-delay27mar27,0,5710023.story?coll=la-home-headlines via Atrios

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So... In DeLay's case, a private family decision was made, in an attempt to best reflect the wishes of the patient.

In Schiavo's case, her husband and 22 judges came to the same conclusion about the wishes of the patient - but this time, a bunch of criminal, radical busybodys from Congress and Operation Rescue overruled the patient's surmised wishes, because they thought it would excite "The Base."