Say; don't go away, I hope I didn't offend you? I didn't say I would shoot my son if he had an illness. The Schiavo girl; she had 50% of her brain shriveled and atrophied with scar tissue covering the remainder and water filling the entire cerebral cortex. The limbic system was granulated, about the only thing left of her brain was the portion of the Hypothalymus controlling autonomic functioning. She was blind and deaf, had no higher order activity and an almost flat EEG. For all intents and purposes she had no brain, it was a shriveled mass of atrophied scar tissue inside a skull filled with CSF.. That my friend is not human. Someone who has an illness is different. Allowing her to pass is an act of mercy, not a killing. Forcing her to stay alive with machines is the cruelty. There is a big difference between someone in a coma for 3 months who does have higher order brain functioning and someone who has a mass of destroyed brain tissue lying in a bed for 17 yrs. And why would you want those kinds of descisions to be made for you by some stranger who knows nothing about you? Funny but you never see nurses and doctors waffling on this; they face these issues everyday and almost all of them agree that the right thing to do is allow people to choose if they are hopelessly dying.