Do you want the answer to your question?
I would not mind. If I were a vegetable, I would not be aware I was being kept alive, so I would not mind that I was being kept alive.
On the other hand,
The Prince George, Maryland Hospital Murders (1984-1985)
This involved 17 murders and serious injuries to numerous other patients by injection of potassium.
I vote YES!!! I personally have a son who is severely handicapped( age 25). I would not want to be kept on a respirator to keep my heart going, when all other funtions have shut down. BUT, and this is a BIG BUT!! we have a woman, who BREATHES on her own, SMILES, trys to TALK, LAUGHS, all she needs is FED.....HEY. She is productive. WHO is to say she is not BLESSING THE SOCKS off of others?? She sure has inspired ME with her smiles. Don't know about anyone else. I VOTE YES!!!
Terri is not in a "vegetable" state. She is conscious - she is aware of things and people around here. There is an internal life that humans have - their thoughts, feelings, and spirit. How can you assume that she is a vegetable? A carrot? Cauliflower?
A vegetable state simply is not an electable choice for most of us.
Again, this use of the word "vegetable" is just so much prop-speak. She is disabled, and many people are disabled. Obviously no one would choose to become disabled. Are you saying that just because people would not choose to become disabled, that once someone, by accident or someone else's design, becomes disabled, they should be killed?
And the icing on the cake...is the continued day after day bills going to someone...either to the insurance company, the state, the family, etc. Just add up 20 more years of maintaining her in a vegetable state.
Again, you cling to this "vegetable" idea. First of all, she is not in a coma, which you know. And EVEN people in comas can often hear. I have a dear friend who I have written about on FR who was in a coma on total life support for weeks, who was not supposed to live. He is now alive and a changed man. Second of all, the money thing is in this case, not the issue. If you have read ANYTHING AT ALL about this situation you know that her so-called husband spent hundreds of thousands of dollars that were meant for her care, all on efforts to kill her. And her parents want to care for her on their own dime.
We all want to live real lives...productive lives...and none of us care for permanent situation like this.
Speak for yourself. You can kill yourself without any outside help (guns, rat poison, cliffs, starving yourself, etc) when you think you aren't productive enough. You have no right to judge when others aren't productive enough and thereby forefit their right to live. Your argument is the exact same argument used by Hitler and his minions. Exact, word for word. Non-productive, therefore non-persons.
Right at this minute, there are cloistered nuns, from the materialistic viewpoint, non-productive people, all they do is pray for the welfare of all people. Right now there are saints of many religions, praying and meditating for the welfare of all. In your viewpoint, they are non-productive.
"Real lives" does not equate with "productive lives."
We must, therefore, be attentive to where foul play attempts to circumvent the rule of law, such as in this case, where the husband's discovery of the wife's alleged wish to die, was actually a recollection found by his attorney, many years after the alleged comments made in passing between husband and wife allegedly occurred.
Not until eight years after the initial incident which led to Terri's being rushed to the hospital from her and her husband's home, did he propose that she had ever even suggested such a wish.
Unfortunately for her, if your view is correct, such a whisper from long ago, is insufficient upon which to make it more than it is, inspite of the concerted efforts by the husband, his attorney with vested interested in the hospice where she has been held, and the judge who denied all other pleadings that demonstrated proof of life --- that is, the will to live.
Up to and including the fact that for all this time, she has endured.
That is defined as the will to live, and a court would need quite a lot of solid evidence to defeat it.
Neither Mr. Schiavo, nor his representatives, have been able to provide such evidence.
From our perspective, a baby in its mother's womb, has no "quality of life" which meets your definition; and so, it is relatively easy from the outside, to dismiss the will to live.
I submit to you, that every day for a baby, is a struggle; there is much to defeat it; yet babies endure.
It is their right to die trying.
It is the right of the living, to die trying to keep on living.
It is the right of the living, to seek out proof of life in what beings may seem dead already, but die trying to save them.
For some of use, that is what we do for a living.