Doctors in the US have removed the feeding tube that has kept a brain-damaged Florida woman alive for 15 years after US lawmakers tried to prolong her life by subpoenaing her to appear before Congress.
The feeding tube was removed from Terri Schiavo, the woman at the heart of a long right-to-die battle, yesterday evening (6.45pm Irish time) and she was expected to die in seven to 14 days.
Her husband's lawyer called the last-minute attempt by US congressional Republicans to keep the tube in place "nothing short of thuggery" and called Democrats "spineless" for failing to thwart it.
Ms Schiavo has been fed through a stomach tube since a heart attack starved her brain of oxygen in 1990, leaving her in what the courts declared was a permanent vegetative state. Her husband and legal guardian, Michael Schiavo, said she would not have wanted to live in that condition and won permission to remove the feeding tube.
He was not in his wife's room at the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Florida, when the feeding tube was removed in what his lawyer, George Felos, described as a "very calm" and prayerful procedure. But her husband was at her bedside later, Mr Felos said.
Republican congressional leaders made the last-minute bid to keep the tube in place by subpoenaing Terri Schiavo to appear before hearings and committees later in the month, a move that would have granted her protection as a witness in a congressional inquiry.
House of Representatives Majority Leader Tom DeLay called removing the feeding tube "an act of barbarism."
"Terri Schiavo is alive. ... She is as alive as you or I, and as such we have a moral obligation to protect and defend her from the fate premeditated by the Florida courts," DeLay said.
Ms Schiavo's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, are fighting to keep her alive, saying she responds to them and could improve with rehabilitation and have lobbied lawmakers to intervene.
The US courts and legislative bodies have set a broad legal framework for such end-of-life decisions but have generally considered them a private matter for families to settle according to their own beliefs. The highly public seven-year dispute between Terri Schiavo's husband and parents has galvanized activists on all sides of the right-to-die issue and ignited new debate about state and federal powers.