I've had trouble working up any feelings other than "its a horrible mess about which I am not qualified to comment" about the Terri Schiavo affair. I'm not going to get drawn into the rights and wrongs now - I suspect that what we are seeing is the usual media/partisan political attempt to paint in black and white what is actually best coloured in various shades of gray.
However one post linked to by Majikthise (excellent likagery about the whole business in multiple posts) really got me becuase it seemed to sum up the cluelessness of the "let her die" crowd:
On March 21, 2005 12:44 am, the extremists in charge of the US Government showed the world that when they don't like a law or a legally valid court decision - ANY law, ANY court decision, for ANY reason, no matter how carefully adjudicated - they are prepared to rip it up. There is a word for this.
The word is fascism.
Excuse me? Fascism is not a bunch of politicians following a (fairly complicated) set of procedures to pass emergency legislation that alows a judge to start doing something some time the following day. You can, arguably, call it over-reaction and you can criticise it in numerous ways but comparing it to fascism shows your own ignorance and, possibly, the fact that your side has no good argument. If the USA were a fascist state then the stormtroopers would be menacing Terri's doctors at gunpoint to make them keep feeding her and a separate group of stormtroopers would have paid a visit to the Florida state judge who is causing all the trouble and either killed him or convinced him by means of torture to be a lot more reasonable about the whole thing. In fact given that it was Fascist Germany that produced the T-4 Euthanasia program, it seems to me that there is a far stronger argument that says that it is the "let her die" crowd who are the heirs of Fascism.
Now one question that has crossed my mind about Mrs Schiavo is "who is paying for it?" Originally thought crossed m my mind for the point that I thought that the people who wished to keep her alive should at least offer to pay her medical expenses, something that I still think has merit in that I would have thought that since US healthcare is a business someone must be being billed a lot of cash to keep her alive and one might have thought that the money could perhaps be better spent elsewhere. However in the light of the comment above the question now becomes more interesting. Apparently she is being kept alive by the Federal Medicare system, a system which is authorized, budgeted etc by the Federal Congress so arguably the politicians should have some say in the proceedings. Of course the problem is that members of Congress don't actually shell out for Medicare themselves and do seem to be remarkably good at spending other people's money so the chances of any Congresscritter actually daring to try and look at this from a cost/benefit perspective seems rather low (or indeed any other perspective that what will keep them elected).
I'm not always impressed with the European willingness to let other people die - Dutch babies, French pensioners... - but I do think that sometimes the desire to prolong every life no matter what the cost is also wrong. There needs to be a clear, transparent and open process that decides when the life support should be removed and about what happens afterwards. Personally I find the idea of just stopping food and water to be a horrible get-out. If you think the person in question is better off dead then have the cojones to administer a quick-acting poison. If you can't quite grit yourself to do that then you need to keep said person alive. Just removing life-support and waiting is a coward's solution that only appeals to people who are unwilling to take the responsibility.