The most difficult aspect of this case is that the public at large, our Congress, and the mainstream media, can't seem to be able to separate the moral issues of this case from the legal issues of this case.

The legal side has done, repeatedly, what it should have done. Adjudicate this matter through the courts, because there was no living will or advance health care directive, and the person's legal proxy (the husband), had his decision challenged in the courts when the family (and the husband IS the family too!) couldn't agree on withdrawing medical treatment.

So, when there is a dispute in a case where a family cannot agree on medical treatment options, and there is no written record of what the patient's wishes are, sadly, they sometimes take their dispute into the public realm of the courts.

Now, I believe both sides in this case have strong moral arguments. But at the end of the day, only one person (the legal proxy), has the LEGAL right to make the decision on behalf of the patient. That is why the medical profession is nearly unanimous about this case, and the doctors backing the Schindlers are viewed by the majority of the medical profession as being a minority of extremists with a political agenda (like Senate majority leader Bill Frist), and not the best interests of the patient and the family.

The medical profession ALWAYS trys to determine what it is the patient themselves want/would have wanted as the primary thing in these decisions. My mother's doctor, when she was dying, would call my mother on the phone all the time, to discuss whether the treatments being proposed were OK with her. We changed my mother's living will/advance care directive numerous times over the past 5 years that lead up to her recent death. Her doctor was prepared to fight us, her family, if he felt we weren't honoring HER wishes. That is the #1 concern to the doctors--that whatever is done, that it be done in accordance with the wishes of the patient, even when the patient's family disagrees with it.

That is how it should be. That this family took this into the public realm like this shows, to me, just how screwed up they are.