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Since dying from starvation and dehydration is so painless, why have we worried about people who have been in famines? Why do we bother helping those people out who can't provide this for themselves? All this time I was under the impression that going without food was a horrible way to live, but now that I know better, I think the USA shouldn't spend any $$ on taking care of impoverished people of the world! /sarc

Since dying from starvation and dehydration is so painless, why have we worried about people who have been in famines?

Well, it hasn't been from concerns about pain. The theory, in case you missed it, is that with a little transitory help they can be restored to self-sufficiency (it doesn't always work out that way). We are trying to prevent normal healthy people from dying from lack of food. Alzheimers patients are, well, a little different than that. Do you think that Alheimers results from failure of a wheat crop? Are factual distinctions lost on you?

Ohioan, you make such great and lucid posts--and with such reasoned (a good number of which thought universally obvious,) clear-headedness.

Court ordered starvation (including nothing by mouth otherwise, period--not even ice chips or a swabbing on the lips,) of an innocent, defenseless fellow human being--footed, premised on, and justified in a decision at which was arrived through a basis of HEARSAY--which was not mentioned with regard to what Terri's wishes expressly were, until SEVEN years after the fact and monies banked; completely absent *anything,* ANYTHING in writing from the innocent person (the human being ordered to be starved to death,) via the removal of a feeding tube (not a *artificial* *breathing* *machine*,) upon which MANY disabled people rely for daily sustenance, (just as we all rely on daily sustenance to live,) when a human being's body is NOT already shutting down in natural preparation for death, when court orders/summons (dictated to the sole reviewing judge of the case, who not ONCE visited Terri,) who ordered death to that very human through starvation) are expressly ignored and evaded by overriding authorities, when the only de novo review was subsequently rebuked (and Congress was, at BASE, requesting that Terri Schiavo be given the same consideration given anyone convicted of Capital Punishment,) and the wholly MORAL position being one to always err on the side of LIFE (easy one--ask President Bush,)...

...the position taken be those who feel that the court-ordered decision to (VERY slowly and PAINFULLY) starve a human being to death was right and moral and justified, OR within rights of any sort...are, themselves, figuratively STARVED.

"...life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."