I'm not disagreeing.
Although I will say this. Approximately 70-75% of people in this country do not have living wills.
And yet thousands of families a day in hospital across this country make decisions exactly like this without benefit of living wills.
Most of those folks, I believe, meet the criteria for brain death and/or or are being ventilated. If I remember correctly. Please correct me if I'm wrong. We've had an experience like that. Neither of those things applies in this case. For folks who don't have a living will, all I can say if they'd better get one or pray they've got family members more loving than Michael Schiavo.
"And yet thousands of families a day in hospital across this country make decisions exactly like this without benefit of living wills"
Herein lies a big problem in the Shiavo case, it's not the family deciding. It's the husband only and he's treating Terri's family like dirt.
I think that these common decisions are the ones based on trying to prolong life another day, another week, in a terminal situation where the outcome cannot be changed even with extraordinary measures. The decision to terminate a healthy, but cognitively disabled person is not the type of decision happening every day--if it were, there wouldn't be court involvement every time a "loving" family member decides they're tired of waiting for the person to die.