[Restorer]

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.

[chimera]

I do not buy the argument that because a thing is done routinely makes it right, if that is what you are saying. Again, history gives us the lesson here. The Nazis killed tens of thousands a day in places like Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz. They did it routinely, every day, year in an year out. But that fact does not make the act morally acceptable.

Absent clear and irrefutable proof of an individual's wishes (which is the case here, and I don't know how many other times, but whatever they are doesn't attest to the rightness or wrongness of the act), deciding on their behalf that they should die places our moral souls in mortal peril. Once you establish that principle as being morally acceptable, and once you choose death as being preferable to life, you open the door to unspeakable atrocities, all perpetrated in the name of "what's best".