A pretty thorough fisking of the judicial reasoning that led to a decree that an innocent woman should die of thirst.
What to do so that this never happens again.

Mark Steyn is scathing.

Lawrence Henry writes about his 20-year reliance on dialysis machines and immunosuppressants, and the failure of his second transplant:

So here I am in Terri Schiavo days, and you will forgive me if in this whole intense storm I feel a whole lot more like a target than an advocate. With every dialysis treatment, I feel better, and I am grateful to be restored to my family in better shape than I have been for a long time.

Am I on life support? I suppose I am. Long before the Schiavo case broke on the national scene, when I felt at my worst, as I thumbed through a file on my desk, I found the health-care proxy I had signed before my second transplant. A health-care proxy is of course not a living will. Nonetheless, moved by some impulse I did not then understand, I tore it up. I find myself quite reluctant to sign another.

All of us have an inoperable illness. For the best of us, death is the crown of our lives, the title of the story. For those of us in the wealthy West--where, honestly, I'm not going to die from a mine explosion or a suicide bomb or a factory fire--death is at least one of three things. It's the expression of the most humiliating, unconquered urges (all those hamburgers, all those cigarettes, all those whiskey-and-Diet-Cokes); or it's the unfair, weirdly singular fact of a genetic problem or a sudden illness, where you're singled out and it's horrible because no one else is; or it's the last laugh of all us carnivorous, smoking, drinking people against the rest of you. "Hah, you're dead too!"

None of these three situations is especially attractive.

. . . I think at the very least we should all be deeply skeptical of any worldview that attempts to present humiliated, helpless human lives as somehow less worthy than autonomous, dignified lives. It's bullies and torturers who try to convince us that if you can show someone humiliated and helpless you've somehow shown her as less worthy of sympathy.

One of this week's memes has been "Would you want to live this way?"

Here's the news flash from my end: I fully expect to.

. . . With Terri as my teacher this week, I have gone to school. I've confronted, in some sense, my own future, and pondered my response to it.