What is disturbing to me about what this case illustrates is that we have drifted away from these founding principles. What we have here is an agency of the government no longer taking the role of safeguarding a fundamental right, but adjudicating whether or not this right applies to an individual who has been convicted of no capital crime. IOW, the government is placing itself in the position of granting the right of an innocent person to live. If this is so, then passing/changing laws in reference to those inalienable rights has no meaning, because we have lost the vision of what the true role of government, as envisioned by the founders, really is. An agency of the government then becomes the mechanism of granting a fundamental right. Individuals are no longer endowed with it from their beginning, and only by the whim of government to they retain it. Then, whether or not an individual, or group, lives or dies is no longer answered by appeal to inalienable rights. It simply becomes a question, as the Nazis showed, of who has more guns and bayonets.
Just as with abortion, once we cross the line and allow an outside agency to be the determiner of whether or not what has heretofore been regarded as an inalienable right applies to a particular individual, we have abrogated, as an operable legal and philosophical and moral principle, the entire concept of inalienable rights. The result, as history shows, can only be measureless destruction.
The only problem with what you say is that what is being done to Teri Schiavo has been routinely done for at least a decade. The only real difference is that part of her family opposes it and has succeeded in turning it into a media firestorm.