Schiavo: Who's "She"?
Matthew Yglesias lays out conveniently one of the interesting conflicts I've noted in partisans of the starve her to death side of the Schiavo brouhaha:
Many doctors and many lawyers have examined the sad case of Terri Schiavo. They've determined that she is in what's called a "persistent vegetative state"—a state, in other words, in which all the functions of consciousness, decision-making, emotion, and thought have been destroyed and from which she has no hope of recovery. They have also determined, through arduous litigation, that, to the best of our ability to know, she would not wish to persist indefinitely in this state, and that it would be in keeping with her best interests and desires to have her feeding tube removed, and to die.
If both of the points Yglesias is making are true, who, exactly, is this "she" who is "persist[ing] indefinitely in this state?" Doesn't sound anything like the woman who allegedly doesn't want to live this way–that woman, after all, was conscious, had emotions and thoughts and the like–so why should "she" care?