Woman Allowed To Die: Where's Congress? Where's Frist?

A fine, sensitive article in the New York Times detailing the end of life decisions surrounding a woman in the Bronx. This very scenario -- family members coming together with doctors and bioethicists to decide her treatment -- takes place every day all over the country, long before and long after the circus surrounding Terri Schiavo.

In this case, the doctors convince the husband to take some steps before removing her ventilator, the woman recovers enough to make her own decisions and makes absolutely clear she does not want to be kept artificially alive on a ventilator if her breathing becomes labored again. It does, she is given morphine to ease the pain and quietly dies.

Just as the fanatics who circled Terri Schiavo like vultures had no interest in whatever Terri might have wanted, they would never want this woman to be able to make her own end-of-life decisions. They would insist that she HAD to be kept on a ventilator, even though the woman herself expressly refused it. The fanatics do not want to help people make their own decisions, they want to take those decisions out of your hand.

Why aren't the fanatics picketing every hospital and hospice in this country in the wake of Terri Schiavo? Because they know the vast majority of Americans disagree with them and think their fanaticism is misguided and wrong. Even so, no one wants to keep them from controlling their own end-of-life decisions; if they want to spend decades as a vegetable hooked up to machines, no one else cares. But if their real goal -- to force everyone else to do the same -- was made clear, the fanatics know America would reject them.