Hmmm. So you're saying that it's murder to not impose care on people who are unable to survive without extreme external measures?
What if Terry's heart gave out, but they had a blood pump handy? Would it be murder to not hook that up? What if she quit breathing on her own? Would it be murder if we didn't hook up the iron lung? What if her kidneys gave out? Would it be murder to not hook her up to a dialysis machine? What if she got pneumonia and lost most of her lung function? Would it be murder if we didn't give her a lung transplant?
Do you see the problem here? Where do you draw the line when you're dealing with a human being who not only will die if care is not systematically provided, but who also does not even show classical survival instincts to even attempt to care for themselves? When no brain function is present beyond that you would expect from a houseplant? Does it become murder to stop watering a houseplant?
How about the homeless man on the street outside the hospital? Does it become murder to not provide food and shelter to that person, free of charge? Better yet, should you charge the relatives of a homeless man who dies on the street with murder, because they did not provide life support?
It's a pretty complicated issue. My Grandfather died last year after he went into a coma following a decade of declining health. He HAD provided clear, legal guidance that he was not to be forcefed in that event this happened, and he died a week or two later. If he hadn't given that guidance, should the hospital have been charged with murder if they had simply let an old man die when it was his time to go? Or should society have forced the hospital to keep my grandfather plugged into every machine possible? I am very certain that my grandfather would have "lived" (ie kept breathing) for another couple of years if he'd been kept alive by extreme artificial means. Although he had multiple serious health problems, they were nothing that a completely sterile environment, forced breathing and feeding, blood filtering, and another couple of million bucks of treatment per year couldn't have overcome if the goal were to simply keep his heart beating.
Murder? There's a pretty wide gray line between society's obligation to care for the indigent and murder, and people need to really think through their position when they draw their line in that gray area, because it opens up liability in areas we simply can't or don't want to go to. Am I a murderer for not giving more money to unicef? At some point we have to realize we can't always fight nature, and we need to smartly decide when it makes sense to allocate scarce resources in the fight against natural mortality.
