I love you folks. So, because poor Terri didn't have enough forewarning of her impending disaster to notarize or tape record her wishes, you get to disregard them and sentence her to innumerable years of abuse with stomach pumping and diapers.
Now I am perfectly willing to treat your body as you wish to have it treated, including endless preservation and up to and including freezing your brain after death (if you wish), but there is no basis in law or justice to disregard others wishes just because your obsession with physical life is greater than theirs.
The original argument from the assembled group here was that Terri's wishes had not been accurately determined. But as that became more and more difficult to sustain, they began to move to your position: Only wishes in writing and/or preceded by "mother may I" are to be regarded. Too bad that isn't the law. My wishes to have my life ended when I am no longer mentally present are entitled to as much 'regard' as your materialistic insinuation that only physical life counts.
At the time she supposedly uttered her wishes, no reasonable person would have expected that such utterances could be the basis for removing someone's food and water. It was preety much universally recognized that if a person wanted such wishes to be carried out they should put them in writing or other such tangible medium. That a person who was able to do did not would have suggested pretty strongly that the person wasn't sufficiently serious and certain of their wishes to commit themselves to them.
If a person walks into a leasing office day after day, expressing what they say is a serious interest in renting an apartment, but they never put down a deposit nor sign a lease, how serious are they about renting the apartment? Could a landlord use the fact that the person said they wanted to rent an apartment as a basis for holding them to a lease? Of course not. The fact that the person never signed a lease nor put down a deposit shows that--no matter what they said--they cannot be presumed to have been serious enough about it to commit.
If Terri was serious enough about her wishes to express them to three people with the intention that they be carried out, why wouldn't she have written them down? Lack of foresight cannot be the answer if you're claiming she had the foresight to tell three different people about them. Laziness could possibly be the answer, I guess, but tape recorders were common enough in the 1980's I would think she would have had access to one [video is much better than audio from an authentication standpoint, but audiotape is still way better than nothing]. What other explanation would you offer?
It seems to me much more reasonable to say that if people want to ensure their wishes are carried out they must commit them to some tangible authenticable medium (with failure to do so having the likely consequence that their wishes might not be carried out) than to allow hearsay in cases where a person could have expressed their wishes in tangible form had they wanted to. Allowing hearsay is bad for at least two reasons: