Terri Schiavo’s Husband Blasts Jeb For Ad ‘Exploiting’ His Dead Wife

Former Florida Governor and current Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is under fire over an ad that his “Right to Rise” SuperPAC is running in South Carolina. The spot features a still photo of the late Terri Schiavo, whose right to live or die became a hotly contested political issue when Jeb was governor. Schiavo’s husband Michael Schiavo waged a legal battle to follow what he said would have been his wife’s wish, which was to remove her feeding tubes and allow her to die.

The ad casts Bush as a defender of life as Schiavo is shown in her hospital bed:

“He’s a man of deep faith who fought time and again for the right to life.”

Schiavo’s husband, who eventually won the right to follow his wife’s wishes, released a statement strongly condemning the ad Thursday. From The Tampa Bay Times:

“It is simply disgusting that Jeb Bush and his super Pac would exploit my wife’s tragedy for his crude political gain. Shame on Jeb Bush,” said Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband, who said she did not want to be kept alive in that state and was repeatedly challenged by Bush and Schiavo’s parents and siblings.

“Using his disgraceful intervention in our family’s private trauma to advance his political career shows that he has learned nothing. He’s proud of the fact that he used the machinery of government to keep a person alive through extraordinary artificial means — contrary to the orders of the court that were based on the courts determination, made over 6 years of litigation, that doing so would be against her wishes,” he said. “What the campaign video shows is that if he ever got his hands on the power of government again, he would do the same thing again, maybe next time to your family.”

(h/t HuffPo)