Terry Shiavo Poll

[Gabu]

By "Let her die" you mean "Kill her", right?

Not necessarily.  If someone, with no external assistance whatsoever, would die naturally, and is being kept alive solely through external intervention, and if that person has very little chance to ever be able to live without that assistance, it could scarcely be counted as murder to simply not give that intervention.

That said, I hardly think that letting someone starve to death is a humane way to let someone die.

[Gabu]

I should note that my response to Supersoulty wasn't an indication that I'm in favor of letting Teri (Terri?  Terry?  I've seen three different spellings...) die.

I've always been in favor of allowing euthenasia if the patient directly requests it, and my position does not change in this case.  Since Teri can't request it, I don't believe we should be pulling the proverbial plug.  We can speculate all we want, but in the end we don't know, and if it somehow comes to light that she did not, in fact, want to die, there is no going back if we do make the mistake of having her die.  We should wait until we know for sure.

As an aside, this is also the reason I'm against the death penalty, but that's another story that is probably not appropriate for this debate.