I have been trying to get people to focus on the law and not the actions of the court which can not go beyond the law. In this sad case the law is what created this court decision.
The proper law would have had a review of her condition that would satisy everyone with little doubt as to if she was in a PVS or not.
PS: This issue falls into 2 camps - those that think her life support should remain because she is not in a PVS (the majority it seems) and those that are against her life support ending even if she is in a PVS - no matter what state she is in. Which one are you?
No, in this sad case it is the route the judge chose to take through the law that created this judicial starvation murder. He had enough latitude in several places that he could have spared Terri.
How about a third camp which is "she might not be in a PVS but we need to do a h*ll of a lot more than Michael ever did or authorized to be sure, including a lot of therapy."
There are a lot of "red herrings" in this case which are going to play out later.
One is the so-called "Persistent Vegetative State".
This is a term which was invented AFTER the discussion about terminating life support began in the 1970s. The purpose of a new diagnostic category, "PVS", was to clarify that there were patients who had not experienced death of the whole brain but who nonetheless would not recover.
Of course, there are many other patients with damaged or absent diencephalic function who do not have "PVS" but who nevertheless are not going to recover.
The use of the term "vegetative" is dehumanizing (vegetables do not have beating hearts, do not breathe, etc, etc, etc), and the invention of this diagnosis intended it to be dehumanizing, in that it would allow the purposeful death of humans. (In a similar way, saying "brain dead" does the same thing, except that brain dead people are really dead in a way that PVS and other brain-damaged people are not).
If it's wrong to kill Terri Schiavo because she has "almost enough brain damage to have PVS, but not quite enough", then it's also wrong to kill her if she actually has "PVS". People who are so invested in a "wrong diagnosis" are barking up the wrong tree.
In moral terms, the use of the term "PVS" obscures more than it reveals-which is exactly what it's inventors wanted to accomplish.
Correction, 4 or more camps. Error on PVS = 2, Error on correctly finding Terri's wishes = 2, Ethics of forced starvation as a means to CAUSE death = 2. There are various combinations and permutation of those, as you know.