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As I read the situation, the significance of Terri's death was NOT that she was in any sense the first case of someone starved to death by a faithless spouse under cover of law, but that -- to the contrary -- there have already been tens if not hundreds of thousands of such cases; but this is the first time we have been able to find out that such things are happening in our civilization. This is solely due to the dogged tenacity of the Schindler family, and had they been less able to keep their struggle going (and receive valuable assistance in publicity from the new media) she would have been just another unheard case.

The fact that we were able to intercede with calls and such in the case of Mae MaGouirk, and now the new case with the wife trying to starve her husband, is solely due to our being newly informed that this is happening. I am sure that millions of people are shocked to hear about all this for the first time, and to hear that it has already been going on for many years.

In an analogous manner, I was shocked in 1973 to hear about something called "abortion" and it still inconceivable to me that such things can occur in a civilized country. Yet by 1973 there were already 500,000 annually (and "legal"-izing it merely tripled the number).

So I feel that we have been deceived by the fact that all this this becomes entrenched and institutionalized, so our efforts come not at the beginning of the incidence, when we could hope to influence attitudes and behaviors, but when they have already been (without our knowledge) accepted as normal by an entrenched power structure and we face fierce resistance to what they then see as an unnecessary "change" (restoring what we thought was the status quo of the presumption for life).