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Man Cleared to Remove Wife’s Feeding Tube

PINELLAS PARK, Fla. - A judge gave Terri Schiavo’s husband permission to remove the brain-damaged woman’s feeding tube in three weeks, handing him a victory in his effort to carry out what he says were his wife’s wishes not to be kept alive artificially.

Good.

Let me go on record now: If I’m ever completely vegetative, with no reasonable chance of ever coming out of it, don’t keep me hooked up to the machines. Keep me from being a brain-dead, artificially-autonomic lump of flesh in some hospice somewhere.

If I’m not coming back, don’t prevent me from moving on.

In the meantime, the woman’s parents, who want her kept alive, are expected to ask another court to block the order from taking effect.

The judge wrote that he was no longer comfortable granting delays in the long-running family feud, which has been going on for nearly seven years and has been waged in every level of Florida’s court system. He said the case must end.

Of course, no story even parenthetically about assisted suicide would be complete without the Catholic Church weighing in:

“If Mr. Schiavo legally succeeded in provoking the death of his wife, this would not only be tragic in itself, but it would be a serious step toward legally approving euthanasia in the United States,” Cardinal Renato Martino, the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, told Vatican Radio on Thursday.

Glad to see Those Who Know What’s Best For Us hard at work.

Then again, this is the church whose leader, in his recent pre-tracheotomy days, compared abortion to the Holocaust.