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Thank you for continuing this dialog. I wish we could have it in person, actually, so we could maybe clear up some peripheral issues quickly (e.g. am I over-emotional? are you? we could tell at a glance!) And we would maybe find each other reasonable, even if we were still obliged to disagree.

You wrote: "The feeding was futile because it only sustained her body. Her "life", her consciousness, was already gone.

I understand your point, but you are mistaken. Life and consciousness are separate things. Terri Schiavo possessed life until she died--- of dehydration, as the autopsy concluded, and not of her underlying brain injury. If she had not been alive, it would not have been "necessary" to kill her.

Consciousness, on the other hand, is an intermittent experience in life. According to many brain researchers (like Dr. Jeffrey Satinover, "The Quantum Brain,") no particular stratum or organ in the neural network seems to function specifically for consciousness: it seemes to be everywhere and nowhere in the brain anatomy.

Human life exists --- indeed thrives --- for months before consciousness can be measured; and throughout our lives it waxes and wanes. There is no ethical difference between a fetus in the womb, a drunk unconscious in the gutter, an autistic 2-year-old, the reversibly comatose, the momentarily unconscious, and a Rhodes scholar asleep in his bed, inasmuch as they still possess human dignity despite their current inability to "think" as self-conscious adults.

That a brain-trauma patient or an early embryo is absolutely unconscious only means that he is unable to function as a person right now or under present conditions, not that he lacks the being of a person. And it is being a person that matters. People under anesthesia cannot feel pain, think or communicate, but this simply means they cannot function as human persons, not that they cease to be persons.

It intrigues me that you say, "If she could have been fed orally, what you're saying is true."

Hm.

In that case, Terri Schiavo possessed human rights in 1996, when Carla Sauer Iyer, RN, fed her with a baby bottle with pudding and jello, but did not possess human rights from 1990-1995 or 1997-2005 because she was not fed orally?

I'm not trying ot mock you here, I'm just trying to grasp the impliations of your statement. Just what is the relationship beween oral feeding and human rights?

Especially those rights which our American philosophy of law calls "inalienable"?