No. The actual question in the case was whether or not Terri Schiavo was able to eat on her own, and whether or not she could swallow that food. She could not.
Her parents, hoping against hope, found "doctors" who fed into their unrealist hope.
I ask you the question again:
If a person, even Terri Schiavo, could NOT chew, eat or swallow, and they have NO HOPE of getting better, isn't a feeding tube unrealistic, unnatural, and an attempt to circumvent God's purpose for that person?
If a person appears generally vegetative, but has enough swallowing ability to take care of their own saliva without drooling, what would be the harm in seeing whether the patient could take on a sufficient quantity of concentrated nourishment (in addition to the saliva) without choking?
Given the alternative of 100% certain death by dehydration, who would have been harmed by allowing the parents to attempt feeding with either a nineteenth-century invalid feeder or a medieval (if not earlier) spoon?
Once again, you beg the question.
The REAL question is whether Terri was dying--that is, whether other bodily functions were shutting down on their own.
The answer is "nope."
And it IS a moral obligation to feed and hydrate patients who are otherwise living, even if they don't meet your personal standards of "living."
We care for the profoundly retarded, people born with NO cognitive ability whatsoever, provide them with therapists, teachers, nurses, caretakers, and doctors, even when it is clear that NO amount of attention is ever going to make them get better. There are tens of thousands of these people living in hospitals all over the country. Since they won't get better, should we stop wasting the money on them and starve them to death? (The major difference between them and Terri being that they were born that way, while she wasn't.)