There is no need to drag the nazis into this. The first person to try to connect Terri with abortion gets their eyes pecked out for the same reason – issue-bundling is a very untidy practice.

I havn’t heard anything about starving babies with downs syndrome in Europe. Not unless your mind is so twisted you are refering to PGD.

Good, evil… just labels meaning ‘agrees with me’ and ‘everyone else.’

The debate over “end of life issues” and “quality of life” questions is exactly the kind of thinking that the nazi government was enthralled with and enacting with their policies.

To let someone starve to death because their “quality of life” is not equal to teh standard of society is barbaric.

To let babies with Downs Syndrome starve to death BECAUSE they are not “normal” (as is getting to be standard in some european countries) is evil.

And THAT is the end of the debate, because saying that killing people that aren’t the same as everyone else, health or mentalwise proves you hold to evil beliefs, and you aren’t going to admit that you are evil, are you Suricou Raven?

Besides, there is no connection – the nazi’s had a *completly* different reason, motivation and standards. The Terri debate has no link to them. At all. Any attempt to dredge one up where none exists is the tactic of an unskilled debater.

Getting back on topic though, I think we are dealing with two seperate but related issues here. The specific case of Terri, and of euthanisia (Wether withdrawn-support or assisted) in general.

The first, at least, I see no problem in. Terri did not have a poor quality of life. She had no life. And no mind – her body was nothing but an empty shell. I see no issue with letting it die – she was as good as dead already. If I were religious, I would be confident her soul had left already. The only concern I have is that legally, she had to be allowed to die of natural causes, and starvation results in multible organ failure. Waste of good parts – her brain was ruined, but the rest of her might have been enough to get a couple of people off the transplant list.

In general… there it gets more complicated. But I think some effective system and standard could be put in place with safeguards (It would require multible medical experts testify, and may be overridden if a living-will was in place). Its really not practical to have a national circus in every case as happened for Terri – media mobbing, legal fights, even legislative intervention at one point – and as a general rule, legislation is never supposed to be even considered for the benefit of a single individual. Legislative branch sets policy, judicial applies it in individual cases. Thats how things are supposed to be.

I have heard stories of abuse in countries that do have a system in place – mostly related to families trying to talk an old relative with high care costs into suicide. But information on such cases is very hard to find – the stories exagerate and distort. Thats what the safeguards are for. They might just need a little adjustment.

There can be no compromise when it comes to putting people to death because they are not well and don’t have “a decent life”.

Anyone that seeks a compromise on this issue has not thought through the ramifications of these policies, and are turning a blind eye to what is happening in countries that have adopted a “compassionate end of life policy”.

It is nothing short of murder.

Though personally, I think the existance of liberals and conservatives is itsself a bad thing. It results in issue-lumping – my two least-liked political terms are ‘family’ and ‘pro-life’ for this reason.