In this Autopsy on the Schiavo Tragedy, the New York Times editorial page points out that "The autopsy results released yesterday should embarrass all the opportunistic politicians and agenda-driven agitators who meddled in Terri Schiavo's right-to-die case. There is no evidence that Ms. Schiavo's husband did any of the awful things attributed to him, and no hope that her greatly damaged brain would ever have recovered. The courts were right to conclude that she should be allowed to die after 15 years in what her doctors described as a persistent vegetative state with no hope of recovery."

When I was reading about the autopsy yesterday, it made me wonder if Terry Schiavo had actually even been alive before the feeding tube was removed. If her brain was half the size it should have been, and if she could survive only with the feeding tube - why do we call this "being alive"? Some of her body was alive, but not any of the higher centers of the brain, and not some of the lower centers of the brain. Why were people so eager to keep her in this state of existence?