[Libertina]

Hope I don't get severely burned in the ensuing flame war, but WHY should a family keep artificially alive (long-term) someone who is a vegetable? Or is that not the case here?

[MHGinTN]

While we await the doctor's response to your 'query', allow me to offer the following.

From the article above (from Polycarp): After winning a medical malpractice claim against Terri's doctor and receiving a cash award, Michael Schiavo suspended all but subsistence care for his wife and petitioned the Pinellas County Circuit Court to allow him to stop providing her nutrition and hydration through a "feeding tube." Terri's parents, siblings and friends have been fighting in court to save her life.
Please note that the law suit against Terri's doctor sought 'rehabilitation' funds as well as funds to care for Terri in medicalfacilities. The flip to asking that the courts remove Terri's feeding tube will allow Michael Schiavo to 'inherit' the funds set aside by the settlement, paid by an insurance company who carried the doctor's malpractice policy.

Terri Schiavo is not in what I have come to define as a persistent vegetative state ... and I do have non-physician experience with the PVS through direct experience helping to care for someone actually in a persistent vegetative state and (my in-depth study done at) the loss of my own brother to irreversible brain blood clot that cascaded within days (in the hospital) into irreversible coma state, bodily alive only because of machines and drugs.

The key appears to revolve around the purposeful lack of rehab care for Terri, yet $750,000 were allocated by the insurance settlement for rehab services! Should Michael Schiavo divorce Terri, the funds would follow Terri, to be used for her maintenance and rehab. THAT is why Michael has not divorced her and refuses to shift the caregiver/guardian role to her parents, the Schindlers ... in my researched opinion, of course.

I have posted at my blog page a letter written to the WND news service by Mister Schindler, Terri's father, if you're interested in his perspective. Click here ...

[aposiopetic]

If the family should wish to keep someone alive, why should that offend anyone outside the family? Certainly helpless and unruly infants are kept alive by the families into which they are born, and we are all the better because of the care given the infants by their families. When the person receiving assistance is an adult, why should our view be any different?

[hocndoc]

She is not a vegetable - or wasn't when the video I watched was taped.
And who knows how any of us would react? Especially mothers?

[hocndoc]

I wasn't complete in that last answer.
No one should act - purposefully act - to end another's life unless there is no way to prevent that life from killing others, no matter what condition the other person is in. We humans should never be placed in an artificial position of determining the "worth" of another person's life. Doctors, medical personnell and family members of the helpless have a higher duty than most.

If Terri had made the decision before her illness that she did not want a tube, or if the doctors had decided that a tube would have done nothing but prolong suffering, then an argument can, with great care, be made that it is permissable not to supply food and water artificially.

But, in this case, there is no Advanced Directive, there is a tube in place. There are funds specifically marked to pay for Terri's care and people who love her and would care for her even if there were no insurance monies.

It is not moral to remove a functioning tube. It is not moral to with hold nutrients that Terri has "paid for." (Insurance) It is definitely not moral to act through the courts and medical care system to do so.

Can you imagine what the aides and nurses at the nursing home are going thru?

Terri's husband should be "allowed" by the courts to turn her guardianship over to her family.