her mouth is not being covered.
It might as well be. You miss the point that the status quo is her being fed, just like my six month old niece. If we stopped feeding my niece it would be an act of murder wouldn't it.
Terri Schiavo is not brain dead as far as anyone can tell. If you are brain dead, you have suffered an irreversible loss of all functions of the brain. If agreed to by at least two physicians, that means you are legally dead, such that your organs can be harvested to help other people.
Instead, Ms. Schiavo is in what many physicians call a "persistent vegetative state," or PVS. That means that she lacks an awareness of herself or other people, cannot engage in purposeful action, does not understand language, is incontinent, and sleeps a lot. To be clinically classified as being in a PVS, these conditions should be irreversible. But from what we know, some doctors dispute one or more of these conditions and believe that it is possible that whatever her symptoms, they are not irreversible.
Her condition is hardly unique. In 1995, when the American Academy of Neurology published its report on people in a persistent vegetative state, it found that there were as many as 25,000 adults and 10,000 children in this country who suffered from PVS. Based on the best studies the academy could find at the time, some adults in a vegetative state 12 months after a devastating injury or heart failure could recover consciousness and some human functions. The chances that such a recovery will occur are very small, but they are not zero.
If they are not zero, then withdrawing a patient's feeding tubes and allowing her to die from a lack of water and food means that whoever authorizes such a step may, depending on the circumstances, be murdering the patient. The odds against it being a murder are very high, but they are not 100%.
This is by Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient James Q. Wilson