Thank you for your thoughtful and very thorough response.
While I suspect you and I would disagree about the correctness of the Court's determination of Terri's wishes, we certainly do agree that her wishes HAVE to be paramount. I certainly don't favor a tyranny of physicians. Such end-of-life decisions MUST be focused entirely on the wishes of the person involved and not those of their relatives, friends, etc.
There is of course an intersection with the medical establishment in determinations of "medical irreversibility", "medical certainty", etc. These determinations are often factual predicates of the instructions or wishes of the subject, i.e. "If I am ever in a condition with no reasonable expectation of recovery ...." Well, anyone trying to make such a decision, whether the person himself (assuming he is able) or his guardian or surrogate (if he is not), has to know if the condition is in fact 'irreversible' or if in fact there is 'no reasonable expectation of recovery'.
In practice these decisions are seldom made in the first week, or month or even year of the condition. So the judgments of 'irreversibility' or 'expectation of recovery' are usually made with a substantial history of unchanged condition as evidence of 'irreversibility.' As with Terri, goes the argument, if the condition hasn't changed in 8 years, what's to make us think it will change in the future?
So, I think as a practical matter most people are wise enough not to put too much trust in the pronouncements of the medical establishment.
In Terri's case, who says you have to recover? She could not recover, but that does not mean you kill her.
If recovery is the criteria - all of us are there. You don't recover from blood pressure, heart conditions, cancer, diabetes, ms, parkinson's on and on. But you live with it.
Which is why we need to leave dying to the Lord. Man can not be trusted because the world is made of imperfect humans. Why would we be willing to turn over our life or death to imperfect humans to rule on.
We do not murder other people and I'm beginning to think it is time that doing so carries penalties. A few murder cases might remind the medical, hospice, end-of-life panels that man is not given the authority to murder Americans- no matter how they justify it, no matter how they sell it, no matter how desperate the need to kill others is.