Quote of the week- Anne Coulter

Townhall.com ^ | 3/31/05 | Anne Coulter

[ctdonath2]

1. All she needed was food, which her family was willing to provide.

2. He was living with another woman and had two kids by her. A guardian with a conflict of interest isn't a guardian.

[Teplukin]

Let me ask you this.

If he had no other woman in his life, and her parents agreed, would disconnecting the tube have been correct?

[ctdonath2]

No. She was alive, responsive, relatively healthy (aside from effects of brain damage and being locked in a room for 15 years), and only in need of mundane care (food, water, cleaning, stimulation - like any child or disabled dependent). There are indications she didn't even need the tube, just needed soft food placed in her mouth (she could swallow). She was not dying, not terminal, not vegitative, not comatose, not brain-dead, not on life-support, not in need of extraordinary measures. She only needed food, cleaning, and a little friendly attention.

There is a huge difference between "pulling the plug" and locking someone in a room without food/water for two weeks.

If government has ANY arguable responsibility to provide a medical safety net for citizens, this is the ultimate case: a disabled citizen in need only of food and mundane care, with nobody else willing or able to provide it. If not that, then certainly nothing else.

Deliberately starving a disabled dependent is evil. Even if her chain of legal guardians (husband first, parents next, then extended family, friends, community, etc.) ultimately abdicated their responsibilities, the federal government (acting on behalf of all citizens) is the last final guardian, which has (both theoretically and in current law) the legal and moral responsibility to compel a public hospital to continue mundane care (and I say this as a conservative libertarian) at taxpayer expense while working back thru the chain of guardianship, compelling guardians to fulfill their moral and legal responsibility.

Terri was killed only because she had an IQ of 10 and her husband wanted her gone. Her parents wanted to feed her; if they didn't, guardianship then falls to someone else, ultimately to citizens as a whole. If the federal government won't do that, then its only remaining legitimate role is police/military ... and a $2,000,000,000,000+ federal budget is too much to not include mundane care for the helpless.