"That's like taking someone off a respirator and then smothering them for good measure if they coninue to breathe."
Exactly.
They deliberately blur the line between terminally ill people who don't want to it, and a healthy woman, who is being murdered by withholding food and water from her.
An article made these very points:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1368190/posts
An accurate discussion of this sensitive issue requires the making of proper and nuanced distinctions about the consequences of removing nourishment from incapacitated patients. This generally becomes an issue in one of the following two diametrically differing circumstances:
1. Depriving food and water from profoundly cognitively disabled persons like Terri who are not otherwise dying, a process that causes death by dehydration over a period of 10-14 days. As I will illustrate below, this may cause great suffering.
2. Not forcing food and water upon patients who have stopped eating and drinking as part of the natural dying process. This typically occurs, for example, at the end stages of cancer when patients often refuse nourishment because the disease has distorted their senses of hunger and thirst. In these situations, being deprived of unwanted food and water when the body is already shutting down does not cause a painful death.
Advocates who argue that it is appropriate to dehydrate cognitively disabled people often sow confusion about the suffering such patients may experience by inadvertently, or perhaps intentionally, blurring the difference between these two distinct situations.
I was just remembering your comment about this article and thinking whether to go back and find it.