For more than ten years, conscious and unconscious cognitively disabled people who use feeding tubes have been legally dehydrated to death in the United States. This intentional life-ending act-clamping feeding tubes and denying all sustenance-has become so ubiquitous that, generally, little attention is paid. This public indifference was shattered by the Terri Schiavo litigation, an epic legal, political, and media struggle that pitted Terri's parents, Bob and Mary Schindler, against her quasi-estranged husband, Michael Schiavo. At stake was whether Terri would live, as fervently desired by her parents, or die by dehydration as demanded by her husband. (I shall explain...
