Five Days Without Food Or Water

You can't say the US Courts aren't independent. Their latest judgement means that Terry Schiavo will be dead in a day or two, starved to death as Tony Bland was in Britain (four years after Tony Bland was killed, another Hillsborough victim, Andrew Devine, came out of his 8-year coma and, while severely disabled, can communicate with his family).

Her poor parents.

As Dumb Jon points out, over at the BBC 'Have Your Say' page, they're wetting themselves with glee.

We get the 'up yours, Christians' perspective :

If the Lord wants to keep you alive and functioning then he doesn't need any artificial help from mankind. Pull the plug and let's see whether the Lord takes her or raises her up whole. Why would you want to keep her trapped in a vegetative state when heaven is only a breath away?

Michael Hoffman, London


All these right-to-life protestors with their cross-smudged placards should surely have something better to do than interfere in a purely family affair. I am curious as to how some consider it compassion to leave her in this state; a state where she has no idea what is going on, cannot feel pain or pleasure, cannot exercise any form of control. Not to mention that there is no hope in her case for recovery since parts of her brain are irreparably damaged. From a Christian perspective, surely she would be more happy in heaven?

Alex Mangan, 17, Swindon, UK

The 'property of the husband' view :

The right belongs to the husband and nobody else particularly when she is in a permanent vegetative state and there's little or not hope of recovery. It's better to let her die in peace and with dignity.

Catherine, Singapore

And one I was waiting for - ths comparison between a totally innocent woman and a murderer or rapist :

I find it ironic that a president that has supported the death penalty in cases of people deemed by the courts of having educationally sub-normal status yet proposes to stop the natural course for someone whose only crime is having people to care for her. If something like 17 Judges have heard this case and sided with the husband than no one should be above the law - not even a president with a right wing Christian agenda.

Simon, Singapore (any relation to Catherine) ?

Of course there is only one category of brain-damaged person who should be kept alive at all costs. People like Radley-educated Clive Stafford-Smith, and his coterie of well-heeled PR and media types at Reprieve UK fight for the right to life of the Tracy Housels (BBC interview and wall-to-wall coverage here) of this world.

On the evening of 6 April 1985, Ms Drew took a night off from nursing her sick mother, to go ballroom dancing. On her way home she stopped for a cup of coffee at a truckers' lay-by, where she met Housel. She was last seen alive, driving off in her silver Ford Mustang with Housel in the passenger seat. The next day her badly beaten body was found by the side of a road. She had been beaten with a stick and allegedly raped. Her body was so badly disfigured, she could only be identified through dental records.

UPDATE - via Booker Rising, Thomas Sowell on Schiavo.

"What is harder to understand is the fervor and even venom of those liberals who have gone ballistic - ostensibly over state's rights, over the Constitutional separation of powers, and even over the sanctity of family decisions. These are not things that liberals have any track record of caring about. Is what really bothers them the idea of the sanctity of life and what that implies for their abortion issue? Or do they hate any challenge to the supremacy of judges - on which the whole liberal agenda depends - a supremacy that the Constitution never gave the judiciary?”