Food and Water

Rev. Robert Johansen has a long article about the causes behind Terri Schiavo's death. Some excerpts:

"Those fighting to save Terri's life did not recognize what they were up against and were unprepared for its demands until it was too late. The shift in our culture that made her death possible began long before March 31, 2005, and the elements of that shift need to be identified if we are to learn from what happened.....

Over and over on the various cable news programs and in the print media, I saw the issue framed as: Under what circumstances should life be "prolonged"? This word is telling: Generally speaking, the word "prolong" does not have a positive connotation. We do not speak of "prolonging" good things, we speak rather of unpleasant things as being "prolonged." The implication, reinforced every time the word was used, was that Terri's life was something bad or unpleasant that ought to be over.....

The idea that continued human life now requires justification is also evident in the currents of legal thought dominant among those involved in end-of-life issues. They have borrowed a page from the pro-abortion movement's handbook and have begun to redefine legal personhood so as to leave the profoundly disabled outside its boundaries. Dr. Ronald Cranford, a leading bioethicist and the chief medical witness appearing on behalf of Michael Schiavo, has testified that patients in a "persistent vegetative state" (PVS), as well as the profoundly disabled, lack "personhood" and consequently have no constitutional rights.....

In the past, medicine operated under a presumption that food and water simply constituted the basic minimum of care offered to a patient, as a necessity of sustaining life. Now an alternative presumption applies, one based on a redefinition of the boundaries of what constitutes medical "treatment." Under the new definition, food and water, because they contribute to the patient's overall well-being and recovery, now can be considered treatment.....