I think the problem is that she said that she never wanted to have life-support and that if she was ever in the situation she’s currently in, she’d rather die. The problem is that there’s no way for her to die on her own. She can’t do it herself, her brain doesn’t work. A doctor can’t do it, that’d be state-sanctioned murder. Her husband can’t do it, that’d be murder too. The only way to satisfy her wishes is to pull the tubes and wires out of her and have her starve to death.

There’s no legal way for anybody in this sort of situation to die quickly, really. You can’t write a will and say “don’t charge my husband with murder when he injects the lethal dose of into me when my brain is Jell-O”, because you can’t just will away laws like murder like that.

And I’ve heard the neurological argument and am not convinced. Neurological doctors are suddenly all knowing and never wrong? Experts used to think that mentally insane people felt no pain either. But even if I’m wrong and the doctors are right and she’s a drain on society and needs to be put out of her misery or whatever, why not err on the side of caution?

Christ, it’s a syringe of morphine, it’s not like it costs a billion dollars.

Unfortunately, as is almost always the case in cases like this, commentators see “woman in bed” and “remove feeding tube” and immediately jump to the “painfully starving to death” conclusion (or, as Thomas Sowell put it, “the agony of starvation and dehydration”), when that’s furthest from the truth. Neurological doctors the world around agree that when someone is as brain damaged as Terri Schiavo is, they don’t suffer like you and I do. Yes, Scott Peterson was starved to death that would be cruel and unusual punishment, but that’s because his brain actually works.