Thank you (and for Ex Navy Chick's admonition) for your call to discussion "without any penalty to sexual performance, self-image, or social stature."
Ethics, medicine, law and their shared subsets are subject to disingenuous representation - lies disquised as complicated truths.
Basing our government and our ethics on the Declaration of Independence (while not quite as good as if you do everything I tell you to - grin) would be a good start. It would sufficient to protect the rights - and the life - of even utilitarians.
First, will life be ended? (And/or is the person whose life is to be ended a direct threat to the life of another and can the threat only be ended by the taking of life or is there some lesser force that would be protective?) Second, is liberty threatened? (and the rest) Third, is the persuit of happiness or the right of personal property that happiness, liberty, and ultimately life, depend on threatened?
In Terri's case, the issue was one of liberty to decide whether to have one's body subjected to medical intervention. I can support the right to exercise this liberty, because if you don't "own" your own body, you have no liberty and your life is in constant danger.
However, since her life was at stake, I would have required much more evidence of her actual intent and would have erred on the side of "no documentation, it didn't happen" that lawyers seem to require of doctors.
I was very uncomfortable about the conflicts of interest of Michael Schiavo as Terri's guardian and could not have cooperated with the medical intervention of removal of the tube rather than simple discontinuation of its use.
But, finally, the deal breaker for me was the act of Greer to forbid any provision of hydration and nutrition by natural means. To make the distinction between "reflexive" or "involuntary" action by Terri to swallow and to speak of her as "trapped in her body" is to perpetuate the myth of dichotomy between mind and body. The two are not divisible.
We do not have minds that inhabit our bodies. We *are* our bodies *and* our minds. Our mind is a function of our physical bodies. Furthermore, the doctrine of brain stem function as continued life and brain stem death as definition of death are reflections of the fact that the body will not live with even the most invasive and technical medical intervention if the brain stem is dead.
The most disheartening aspect of the entire event was not that a three-sided coin - Schiavo's staggering hypocrisy / Greer's judicial arrogance / the self-righteousness of both - was minted from the ore of human fallibility, but that no one with the authority to do so could manage to find the testicles to blast it from the sky once it was tossed into the ethical air and so save an innocent woman's life.
According to one school of thought. That assertion has not been proved.
Some first class scientists and thinkers have examined the empirical evidence and come to a different conclusion. Nobel prize-winning neurophysiologist Sir John C. Eccles and the eminent philosopher Sir Karl Popper were perhaps the two best known of those men and women who have looked at the evidence and concluded the dualist-interactionist model is a much better fit.
The eminent neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield came to a similar conclusion based on hundreds if not thousands of experiments carried out on conscious epilepsy patients whose exposed brains he electrically stimulated.
Now, you may disagree with Eccles, Popper, and Penfield. But your disagreement does not mean their views are unsubstantiated or irrelevant.
In any event, the dualist-interactionist model does not serve to exonerate Greer, Schiavio, Felos et al, or to justify the forced starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo. Many murderers have sought to rationalize their deed by appealing to their own sense that the victim was better off dead. But that's all it is--a cynical and desperate rationalization.