This just in from John Thomas…
Terry Schiavo is not on life support. She is not suffering from a "fatal congenital disease." If her feeding tube was not removed, she would continue to live, much like if Christopher Reeve's breathing tube was not removed, he continued to live.
There's way too much conflation of the different kinds of medical status to compare Schiavo's case to a myriad of other things, but it's apples and oranges, and just serves to confuse people who might not know what's going on. The insinuations in your recent blog post are part of that confusion.
Why not declare to people that Terri Schiavo is not on "life support" any more than Christopher Reeve was, and that she is not suffering from a fatal disease like the child referenced at the blog you linked to.
You're right that the two cases are not exactly alike but I think you're wrong, at least in a conversational sense, that the term "life support" does not apply in the Schiavo situation. I just did one of them nifty Google searches and found well over 3,000 news stories and headlines that disagree with you. A lot of folks, including doctors on both sides, seem to think she was on "life support."
In any case, the rhetoric and arguments that people are using to demand that her feeding tube be reinserted could certainly apply to darn near any instance where human action or inaction leads to the termination of a life. And without taking sides on the Schiavo matter — because I'm conflicted on many aspects of it — I have to wonder what larger principle her defenders think they're fighting for. Tom DeLay is convening emergency sessons to make sure this one woman has "every opportunity to keep living" but there are plenty of people who don't get that opportunity and I don't see him spending five seconds on them. And just last week, DeLay was trying to cut $40 billion from the Medicaid program, and that would certainly hasten a lot of deaths…and in people who are alive in more than the technical sense that Terri Schiavo is still alive.
If you read the article about the child in Texas, you'll see that it's also about a 68-year-old man who, like Schiavo, is in a "persistent vegetative state." Texas law apparently allows the hospital to turn off his ventilator, which will end his life just as surely as yanking Terri Schiavo's feeding tube will end hers. That man's family is fighting to keep him alive and there isn't even anyone in the case saying, like Terri's husband says of her, "this is what (s)he wanted." Why isn't Congress convening emergency sessions to give that man "every opportunity to keep living?" If we want that to be our national goal, great. Let's apply it to everyone.