Why not kill Mrs. Schiavo quickly and efficiently, by depriving her of air to breathe? In principle, that would have been no different from denying her the other basic necessities of life.
Why not give her a lethal injection? The law would not have allowed those methods; but the reason nobody advocated them was that they would have been too obviously murder. So the court-ordered killing was carried out slowly, incrementally, over days and weeks, with soft music, stuffed animals, and euphonious slogans about choice and dignity and radiance. By the time it ended, no one really remembered how many days and hours it had gone on. The nation accepted it, national polls supported it, and we all moved on to other things.
Next time it will be easier. It always is. The tolerance of early-term abortion made it possible to tolerate partial-birth abortion, and to give advanced thinkers a hearing when they advocate outright infanticide. Letting the courts decide such life-and-death issues made it possible for us to let them decide others, made it seem somehow wrong for anyone to stand in their way. Now they are helping to snuff out the minimally conscious.
Who's next?
The scene, of course, was not set for her. By Felos's account, she was just an insensate, post-human corpse, for whom such tender touches were irrelevant — the comforts that would have made a difference, food and water, having been mercilessly denied. This was theater for the American people.
You just posted abortion cr@p.
I am not an advocate for that.
This has nothing to do with abortion.
If Terri had been given a lethal injection, you would have whined about that, too.
If there were actual "open questions" in this case, it would still be in the court system. The courts have ruled on all the open questions years ago, accepting expert testimony and making their decisions. This is what the courts are designed to do, and they did it quite well - so well that neither the Florida Supreme Court nor the US Supreme Court would hear the appeals.
The fact that a few people have some questions about certain aspects of the case does not change the previous rulings made by the courts. The case is not tried in the MainStream Media. And I think we're all lucky it's not.
The questions were ethical as opposed to legal questions:
For instance:
Is it ethical for a husband who has another woman to be making judgements for the wife?
(Florida law says it's legal. Ethical is another question.)
Is it ethical to withhold food and water from a PVS patient?
(Florida law says it's legal, if it would have been what the person would have chosen beforehand.)
Is it ethical to terminate life without written directions?
(Florida law says it's legal, if there are ways via witnesses, etc. for the judge to determine the patient's POV before the accident.)
The upset people feel, I am guessing, is a combination that Terri's death was unethical based on their POV (a view which I share); confusion over the scope of the private legislation Congress passed; feelings heightened with stories designed to demonize those in favor of Michael Schiavo's motives and to cast doubts on the legality of the court, the legal roller-coaster of the last few weeks, and a misunderstanding (I hope instead of intentional misconstruing!) of how the checks and balances in our system actually work.
It reminds me, in a sad way, of how my son when he was younger would get into all sorts of weird denials in his head about homework projects due.
What Michael Schiavo sought for Terri was in his legal rights as husband of record. What was done to Terri was perfectly legal in the state of Florida.
Nothing anyone can say will remove that fact. It was legal, was reviewed multiple times.
The law had been on the books for six years, I believe.
It's important to realize what is going on is really a battle between ethical points of views rather than facts. Every time someone uses bad or twisted data in favor of their ethical POV, they weaken the cause for that POV. And that's a shame, because the discussion is important.
But it will be lost in a sea of mud if people don't really look at what they are saying and its truthfulness.