It proves it is not the same at all as a do not resucitate request or "pulling the plug".
If they "pull the plug" in a case like this, the person may not die.
In this case pulling the plug is removing her feeding tube.
If she can eat with a spoon (she can) she would not die.
Yet the order is to not feed her in any manner.
That's murder straight out.
That's like taking someone off a respirator and then smothering them for good measure if they coninue to breathe.
There must be intellectual honesty in that this is overt euthanasia, not allowing nature to take its course in a terminal illness or machine assisted organ function.
If one still for it, then fine. Just say it honestly without the lies and euphemisms.
"That's like taking someone off a respirator and then smothering them for good measure if they coninue to breathe."
Exactly.
They deliberately blur the line between terminally ill people who don't want to it, and a healthy woman, who is being murdered by withholding food and water from her.
An article made these very points:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1368190/posts
An accurate discussion of this sensitive issue requires the making of proper and nuanced distinctions about the consequences of removing nourishment from incapacitated patients. This generally becomes an issue in one of the following two diametrically differing circumstances:
1. Depriving food and water from profoundly cognitively disabled persons like Terri who are not otherwise dying, a process that causes death by dehydration over a period of 10-14 days. As I will illustrate below, this may cause great suffering.
2. Not forcing food and water upon patients who have stopped eating and drinking as part of the natural dying process. This typically occurs, for example, at the end stages of cancer when patients often refuse nourishment because the disease has distorted their senses of hunger and thirst. In these situations, being deprived of unwanted food and water when the body is already shutting down does not cause a painful death.
Advocates who argue that it is appropriate to dehydrate cognitively disabled people often sow confusion about the suffering such patients may experience by inadvertently, or perhaps intentionally, blurring the difference between these two distinct situations.