I just heard on the radio that Terri Schiavo has been granted a “stay of execution” until tomorrow at 5:00 P.M. Unfortunately, the newscaster also said, “Terri’s parents have fought a long legal battle to keep their daughter on life support.”

Life support is a term for a set of therapies to preserve a patient’s life when essential bodily systems are not working well enough to be relied upon. Life support therapies utilize some combination of several techniques: enteric feeding, intravenous drips, total parenteral nutrition, mechanical respiration, heart/lung bypass, defibrillation, urinary catheterization and dialysis. The same techniques are also used for intensive care, though life support is concerned with stabilizing a patient rather than healing them.

Technically, Terri’s feeding tube is life support, but the term conjures pictures of a patient in a coma with a breathing machine being fed and hydrated intravenously. Terri Schiavo is not on life support by my definition; she simply requires a feeding tube to be fed several times a day. Does the MSM call dialysis “life support”? How about catheterization? No, then why does a reporter call what is being done for Terri “life support”?
And why do some people, including her own husband, want to starve her to death?