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By Associated PressTerri Schiavo's supply of water and nutrition is scheduled to be disconnected at 2 p.m. Wednesday.
PINELLAS PARK - Their legal options nearly exhausted, family and those who support keeping a severely brain-damaged woman alive by artificial means began an around-the-clock vigil Monday. The group plans to stay outside her hospice to protest the upcoming removal of her feeding tube at her husband's request.
About 10 sign-toting demonstrators, organized by prominent conservative activist Randall Terry, began their vigil on the sidewalk at noon in front of Woodside Hospice, where Terri Schiavo lives in a vegetative state brought on by a 1990 heart attack.
"This is a long, slow burn," said Terry, who founded the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue in the 1980s. "Our intention is to be here 24 hours a day. . . . Our intention is to be peaceful, to be prayerful."
The tube delivering water and nutrition to the 39-year-old woman is scheduled to be removed at 2 p.m. Wednesday. She is expected to die within two weeks.
Schiavo has been at the center of a long legal battle between her parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, and her husband, Michael Schiavo, whose legal right to remove the feeding tube has been repeatedly affirmed by Florida courts.
Michael Schiavo says he is carrying out his wife's wishes that she not be kept alive artificially. The Schindlers say she responds to them and could be rehabilitated with therapy, despite testimony from court-appointed doctors that she will never recover.