[ButlerianJihad]

> someone alive who wasn't really alive.

Wow what a completely horrible and deliberate misunderstanding of the facts. I hope that if you're ever in a state where all it takes to keep you alive is food and water, that people continue giving food and water to you, rather than seeking to starve you to death.

Because someone who eats and drinks is alive, usually by definition, and what her husband sought was to kill her off, because her "aliveness" wasn't "useful" to anyone, and in fact was an inconvenience to him and other people.

Nobody, at the time or since, said that Schiavo "wasn't really alive" but rather, some people wanted her dead, and they wanted that boundary of "ordinary life-sustaining care" to be moved so that it didn't include food and water, administered into her stomach.

[fhdkweig]

> Nobody, at the time or since, said that Schiavo "wasn't really alive" but rather, some people wanted her dead

I'm saying it. She was in "an irreversible permanent vegetative state". That is as close to dead as you can get. Even a coma is better. You can wake up from a coma, but this is an amount of brain damage where the part of the brain responsible for consciousness is dead and never coming back.