Floridians also passed a Constitutional right to privacy amendmendment in the 80's. Any attempt to change the wording of medical directives will have to take that law into account.
It might be easier to get legislation declaring the choice to discontinue medical treatment to be the same as committing suicide...which is already governed by Fl. Law.
I don't think that option is politically viable though. The point is that there were better, more effective ways to affect the outcome then the Schindler advisors utilized.
It might be easier to get legislation declaring the choice to discontinue medical treatment to be the same as committing suicide...which is already governed by Fl. Law.
No! No!
I never proposed attempting to change the wording of somebody else's medical directives. (???) (shock!!!)
I also would NEVER propose defining the choice to discontinue medical treatment, as suicide. (DOUBLE SHOCK!!)
The first would certainly and rightly be illegal (you can't alter somebody else's document after they've signed it.) The second would be gravely immoral. A person has a right to discontinue medical treatment if the treatment is futile or too painful.
The point to remember is that food and water are not medical treatments. They are ordinary care which we morally owe to anybody under our care who is medically dependent or disabled.
Every person on earth needs assisted nutrition and hydration at some point in their lives: in infancy, in the case of serious illness or injury, when there is a swallowing disability, and often in old age. From a historic, cultural, social, psychological, and moral point of view, it is the most basic and universal form of human caring. It can be done with a human nipple, or a rubber nipple, or a spoon, a plastic drinking straw or a gastric tube.
The feeding was not painful or burdensome to Terri. Far from being futile, for 15 years it successfully did exactly what food and water is supposed to do: it nourished every cell, tissue, organ, and system of her body, kept her comfortable, and prevented her death from hunger and thirst.
That is why food and water (even assisted in whatever way) are objectively in a different category from "treatments" which may appropriately be discontinued.
The feeding was not futile, because it sustained her life.
Was her life futile? That is not a question a county probate judge can answer. Nor one he should even ask.