US: As the life of Terri Schiavo ebbed away, her parents face another lost cause - their fight to have their daughter given a Roman Catholic burial near their home in Clearwater, Florida.
Terri's husband Michael Schiavo has already got court permission to have her cremated and the ashes buried at the family plot in Pennsylvania where the couple grew up. The parents appealed through a priest yesterday for Governor Jeb Bush to intervene to save her life, but Mr Bush has said his legal options have been exhausted.
"Bob and Mary Schindler are begging Governor Bush to step in and take custody of Terri," said Fr Paul O'Donnell, a Franciscan monk.
"We're begging the governor to step in, to be a man of courage and to put an end to this barbaric practice that's taking place in Florida." Ms Schiavo yesterday endured a 10th day at a hospice in Pinellas Pines, Florida, without food and water since her feeding tube was removed on March 18th by court order.
A flurry of appeals by the parents to state and federal courts to have it reinserted were rejected.
Mr Bob Schindler said yesterday he feared "they will expedite the process to kill her with an overdose of morphine" but the hospice reacted with a statement saying, "we are not doing anything to hasten or postpone natural death".
Late on Sunday Michael Schiavo allowed his wife to receive communion in the form of a drop of concentrated wine on her lips. Earlier Fr O'Donnell said the rejection of a communion request from the parents was a violation of her religious freedom.
Despite appeals from the family to go home, dozens of people continued to mill around outside the hospice yesterday. Police have arrested a total of 38 people in the last 10 days for making symbolic attempts to bring Ms Schiavo water. On Sunday evening six people in wheelchairs got out and lay in the hospice's driveway, shouting: "We're not dead yet." As tempers frayed, Ms Schiavo's brother, Bobby, asked the protesters to remain peaceful, saying: "You are not speaking for our family."
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times disclosed that Tom DeLay, House majority leader in the US Congress, who attacked the decision to remove Ms Schiavo's tube as "an act of barbarism", agreed 15 years ago that medical support should be removed from his father Charles DeLay who faced life in a vegetative state after an accident. Maxine DeLay, the congressman's 81-year-old widowed mother, said, "Tom knew - we all knew - his father wouldn't have wanted to live that way."