Bourgeois pigs kill suicidal 16 year old boy.

[shoju]

Which then raises the question - what threshold are we willing to accept? I don't, for instance, believe it is a crime to take someone off life support, if they are no longer able to survive without it or make decisions for themselves, so long as the decision is made by those legally entitled to do it.

I think it is a dangerous idea to allow the "decision is made by those legally entitled" to be anything other than the individual, and even then circumstances are key. One of our fundamental Constitutional rights is the right to life, so it should be extraordinarily difficult for the government to take away a life, even when the owner is deserving in the case of heinous crime, or willing in the case of suicide.

This exchange has me curious, as it is becoming a quasi-hotbutton topic in my family. My father's condition with his Brain has reached a sort of.... "quickening" state of its own, and the doctors fear that another stroke caused by bleeding from either an AVM or related Aneurysm could be closer than what we realize. They said they can count on one hand the number of patients they have personally had that had survived one "Blood Stroke" as they called it (my father being one of them). They said that they have never had a patient survive a second one in anything more than a comatose state.

My father has a DNR, and a No Life Sustaining Support Living Will. There are some in my family who do not support this, and are willing to sue to gain power of attorney rights, because of his "obviously deteriorated mental state". Nevermind that since this all started 13 years ago, and my father wasn't suffering as much limitations due to his condition, he signed the DNR/Refusal of Life Support

So who is legally entitled? My father, who signed the papers 13 years ago? My mother? Myself? My Sister? My Grandmother? My Aunts?

Ultimately, I know how my father feels about it, and I want to do what I can to honor his wishes, even if that means I have to go to court on his behalf against my own family. He doesn't want to be a vegetable. He doesn't want to lay there in a bed, living purely because some machine at the bedside does so for him.

"Legally entitled" is an awfully slippery slope. Where does it end?
Do we allow people to challenge a living will?
Do we allow the government to intervene?

The case of who makes these decisions is hard, and it can, and will, (sadly) get messy.

On one hand, I side with Jester, that isn't living.
On the other hand, I don't know how I feel about legally entitled, or the idea that you could become "legally entitled" by suing for it, and going against the wishes of the person in question.