I wasn't on Free Republic when Karen Quinlan was in the news so I can't answer that. Maybe laws do need to be changed, but more importantly, current laws need to be followed. I work for lawyers and they agree Michael should have been removed as guardian when he admitted to openly living with another woman and having children with her. To me, that's the bottom line and had that been done as required by law, Terri would probably still be alive.
No one was. It was in 1976. Karen Ann Quinlan was in a coma and was on a respirator. I believe her mother AND the hospital petitioned the court to allow the respirator to be turned off and they did not want to face murder charges. At no time was nutrition and hydration deprivation mentioned. She lived for 9 years after her respirator was removed, never regaining consciousness.
At the time, many expressed their desire not to be in the same position. And probably would again today if they saw it on the news.
But, the case was NOTHING like Terri's, in that she was not conscious and starvation/dehydration was not considered.
Nobody was -- Karen Quinlan was taken off her respirator in 1976, but tube feeding was continued until her death in 1986.
The Cruzan case was more recent. Matthew J. Franck in "The Court of the Problem" (NRO, March 30, 2005) describes the legal steps from Quinlan through Curzan to Schiavo. For Cruzan:
That year, 1990, the Court decided the case of Nancy Cruzan, whose medical circumstances were strikingly similar to those of Terri Schiavo: Injured in a car accident in 1983, she was subsequently diagnosed as being in a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS), with no hope of recovery, and she was being fed and hydrated via a gastrostomy tube inserted directly into her stomach. The contending parties in Nancy Cruzan's case were her parents, who wished her feeding tube withdrawn, and the state of Missouri, whose laws — as interpreted by the state supreme court — required "clear and convincing evidence" of an unambiguous intent on the part of the patient in such a state before a presumption in favor of preserving life could be overcome. The state's high court held against the withdrawal of Cruzan's feeding tube, and the U.S. Supreme Court (by the barest 5-4 vote) affirmed that ruling, holding that it was consistent with due process for a state to place a heavy evidentiary burden on anyone who claimed to enunciate the desire for death on behalf of an incompetent person.
Franck argues that the seed of the Schiavo decisions were sown in Cruzan, when the majority opinion affirmed the right of a competent person to choose to have his own feeding tube removed, which opened the door to a guardian making that decision.
Think about this for a moment. Can anyone name a case in which a competent person, who was not already dying of an underlying disease or injury, chose to refuse food and water in order to bring about his death? It seems unlikely, since anyone who was aware, able to communicate, and not dying could hardly be expected to choose a mode of death so drawn out — and even less could such a patient be expected to "stay the course" without relenting and begging for water and food. Indeed, a patient who was aware, able to communicate, and not dying might well find his sanity — i.e., his competence — questioned if he made the request.. . .In short, Rehnquist's preposterously invented "right" was the Court's way of blessing a practice called "substituted judgment": the process, varying from state to state, by which parents, spouses, or other close kin establish to a court's satisfaction either that when the patient was competent, he did express a desire not to live as an otherwise healthy incompetent, or (in states a bit more lax) that if he had thought about it when he was competent, it would have been his desire not so to live.