Today the feeding tubes of Terri Schiavo were removed leaving her to die after a long court battle between her husband and her parents who desperately wanted to keep her alive. A last minute, not un-clever, attempt to intervene by Congress failed.

Of course, there’s a wide ranging set of opinions on this, Kevin Drum arguing that Terri’s time has come, and LaShawn Barber arguing the opposite. The divide is not entirely left/right with some conservatives arguing for the discontinuation of Terri’s life and some liberals arguing to keep her alive. I’ve read through the various news reports, blog comments and familiarized myself with the case in a very short period of time so I may be missing a few of the finer nuances or legal arguments, but here’s my conclusion and it is fairly short. Two fundamental aspects - a legal one and a moral one - raise some troubling questions as to why there was such a rush to kill Terri Schiavo.

1. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere, in the entire case file is there a written and notarized statement from Terri Schiavo in which she explicitly authorizes others to discontinue her life should she find herself in the circumstances she is in today. It is remarkably odd that that prerogative is her husband’s only given the circumstances.

2. What makes her husband’s rights to make the call truly bizarre is the zeal with which he has sought to exercise these. The best comment in this department comes from Peggy Noonan:

He has fought the battle to kill her with a determination that at this point seems not single-minded or passionate but strange. His former wife's parents and family are eager to care for her and do care for her, every day. He doesn't have to do a thing. His wife is not kept alive by extraordinary measures--she breathes on her own, is not on a respirator. All she needs to continue existing--and to continue being alive so that life can produce whatever miracle it may produce--is a feeding tube.

The first point outweighs all other considerations. Yes, Terri Schiavo has become an object in a national battle over the right to let her live, a fairly distasteful but necessary struggle in which both sides have gone to extreme lenghts to make their case. The question is whether Schiavo's husband, aided in no small part by the courts, had sufficient grounds to push this case as far as he did. The absence of a clear indication of will from Terri and the feelings and intentions of her family to me are very clear grounds to let Terri live and hope for Noonan's miracle. Any other course of action can simply not be morally justified.