A number of readers have objected to this section from my article today on the main site:
In 2005, the Terri Schiavo tragedy became a heated national political issue, because an accident left the Florida woman incapable of expressing whether she wanted to be kept alive with the aid of life-sustaining technology, and there wasn’t any clear record of what her own wishes would have been.
The main complaint is my suggestion that that Schiavo was “kept alive with the aid of life-sustaining technology.” As a number of readers pointed out, she was given food and water through feeding tubes. We can quibble about whether or not feeding tubes constitute technology, but I probably should have been more precise in my language so as to avoid a dispute over semantics. Either way, I don’t think it changes my main point. If Schiavo had a living will or some form of advance directive about what her own wishes would have been regarding the level of medical intervention she would have wanted, then her tragedy wouldn’t have become a heated national political issue involving courts, the Congress, and the White House.