It's not a beef and I didn't mean to sound snappish. I was trying to answer a gazillion pings before going out for the afternoon.
What has surprised me is that people did not know that this happens every day in nursing homes and hospitals across the nation. My stepdaughter works in a nursing home. We've did this with my husband's aunt on doctors recommendations.
I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong, painful or not. But freepers who have sat by their parents bedside after the feeding tube was removed and spent as much time with them as they could in their final days say it was peaceful.
Not all freepers. One has said that his/her father opted to do this, it took him a couple weeks to die and it was the most horrible thing the freeper had ever witnessed, and he/she is still not over it years later.
The point that others have made, and I have asked about, is the context of the cessation of nourishment and hydration. Was the patient's body otherwise healthy, as Terri's is, in those hundreds of cases a day? That's what I find hard to believe, in fact, I don't believe it. I don't believe that 35,000+ patients, with otherwise healthy bodies, are starved to death per year in this country. The CDC statistics must bear this out somehow. 35,000 a year is less than one hundered a day, but it's a significant fraction of the deaths.
http://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/overview.htm <-- Maybe the data is "in there."