A government with the power to insist I stay alive, has the equal power to insist I die. Just depends upon who is in charge.
What part of Terri Schindler Schiavo's family? Her estranged, trust-fund-embezzling, adulterous husband who wanted her dead? Or her parents, brother and sister who upheld her right to simply go on living (and were willing to pay for it)? And
Terri chose Michael to be the person to make her decisions by marrying him. Her parents should have had no legal standing.
Shouldn't the government stay out of this, specifically the County Probate Judge (!) who (by what authority?) ordered her death by starvation/dehydration?
If the Schindlers hadn't insisted that the courts be involved, they wouldn't have been.
The first enumerated purpose for the foundation of the American government is the right to life. If an organization does not have the power to assert and defend this right, it is not a government.
Your phrase "the power to insist that I stay alive" is strange, though. Nobody has the power to "insist that you stay alive," humankind being a mortal species. Nobody can force you to accept burdensome, futile, "extraordinary" treatment, either. What the government must defend is the right not to be killed: in other words, the right to be free of agression and (in the case of minor children and the medically dependent) the right to be cared for and to be protected from abuse and neglect.
This is all specified, by the way, in Florida law, including the definition that a caregiver who starves a dependent is guilty of criminal abuse/neglect.
"Terri chose Michael to be the person to make her decisions by marrying him. Her parents should have had no legal standing."
First of all, you can't mean that husbands have the right to kill their wives. Certainly absent a written document stating "in the case of the following condition I wish to be starved and dehydrated to death," he had no right to starve her.
You know, don't you, that her husband received a million-dollar medical malpractice judgment and pledged to the jury that he would spend it all on her care, treatment and rehabiilitation, right? So he had a legal mandate to spend HER money in the furtherance of HER health. No one can make the claim that she was healthier dead.
The court ought to have taken the settlement money away from Michael Schiavo when he proved unwilling to use it for the stated purposes, and awarded it to a court-appointed guardian, who could have been her mother, father, or any other person committed to furthering Terri's health interest.
"If the Schindlers hadn't insisted that the courts be involved, they wouldn't have been."
In 1998, Michael Schiavo got Judge George Greer involved when he petitioned the Pinellas County Circuit Court to remove Terri's feeding tube. The Schindlers had nothing to do with it. Please. Read up on the basics before you post your comments on this topic.
Lost in this whole ordeal is the fact that, early on, two physicians had their reputations ruined and possibly their careers come to a halt -- after years of study and practice -- because of a family full of ambulance-chasing gold-diggers who were looking for some deep pockets to go after.