PENNS CREEK — The lawyer who battled for two years to keep Terri Schiavo alive plans to speak at a Snyder County church on Friday.

David Gibbs III will discuss why Schiavo’s 2005 death is still relevant during a scheduled appearance in Penns Creek at the G.I. Straub Memorial Tabernacle, according to Jeremy Fuller, Duncannon God’s Missionary Church pastor and event co-organizer.

At the request of Schiavo’s parents, Gibbs took the fight to keep the brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube in all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Schiavo had been in a persistent vegetative state for 15 years before her husband, Michael Schiavo, won a seven-year legal battle to discontinue life-sustaining measures.

Her death — at age 41 on March 31, 2005, at Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla. — sparked a national human rights debate.

“It’s an issue that’s not going away,” Fuller said Wednesday. “You can call it euthanasia, abortion, genocide. They’re all just fancy synonyms for an archaic principle in the Bible called ‘Thou shalt not kill.’”

Fuller said the group hosting Gibbs’ 7:30 p.m. appearance — Missionary Crusaders — hopes the lawyer will provoke critical thinking among the church’s youth.

“We believe this is a key issue, a defining issue of our time and culture,” Fuller said. “The disrespect for human life is appalling to me and to our church.”

Gibbs’ speech, titled “The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo,” will be free and open to the public.

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