The whole question is ridiculous. Schiavo had the right to do what he wanted to do in the first place. He simply could have made the decision years ago, without ASKING the court's to decide. HAd he taken those steps, the parents would have filed their injuctions and so forth. It would have ended up in court any way you look at.
Schiave, himself, ASKED the court to make the decision. We don't know why, but if I had my father-in-law tell all of PIEnellas county that I was a good-for-nothing adulturer (after Schindler encouraged his son-in-law to date and even met the new girlfriends) and greedy som'bitch (after Schindler got yanked about the settlement money not bailing him out of his economic hardship. Made a bad investment buddy. Deal, like a big boy), I'd sure go to the courts because the Schindlers were going to turn it over to the state anyway had Schiavo exercised his legal frickin' rights.
If these people want to go by religious views, then they ought to stick by their religious views. Isn't the husband the person who decides on their religious view? Isn't their religious view that women are subordinate to, first their father, and then to their husband once married?
And, as for the parent-child relationship being indelible. Please. It's not. It can be severed through the law just as marriage is created/severed by the law. The parent/child relationship is _defined by_ the state from the get go.
It is also shaped (not determined) by society, the social structure within which we live. The practices that tell us what's right and wrong. There's nothing indelible about it in the sense that parental-child feelings would naturally emerge in some state of nature outside of the sway of the social.
Perhaps Miles and the anthropologists can speak to this more, but if we were another culture, the notion that there's some indelible relationship there doesn't hold. Groups that are 'closer' to a state of nature than we are don't evidence the same sentimental bond between parent/child we, in the West, do. Hell, in our own history, it wasn't unusual to sell babies. It actually took political effort and a small social movement to bring adoption to the fore by making a child's life "priceless" instead of something that could have a price put on it.
Wealthy mothers in France though nothing of never seeing their infant for the first three years, shipping them off to the countryside to be breastfeed by a peasant woman who often took in several infants whom she breastfed and fed pablum before they were really ready to digest it. Many of them died from those practices. No one thought wealthy women had some sentimental indelible attachment to her child such that it would preclude her from shipping it off, not to be s seen for three years!
In the colonial era, the local level, the town fathers in a community decided what to do with a child if they felt the parents weren't sufficiently disciplining the kid. They'd pull 'em out of the home faster the Child Protective Services and put him to work in a workhouse or as an apprentice to a craftsman working for some wealthy family. Maybe just because said wealthy family had a grudge or needed an extra hand around their estate. So much for local control being, somehow, more egalitarian. Foo.
Geez. I guess I'm going to have to get out _Domestic REvolutions_ so I can also look up that law about forcing men that committed bestiality to watch while the animal was hung -- because that was considered fitting punishment.
hmmmmmmmmm.
"We live under the Confederacy. We're a podunk bunch of swaggering pious hicks."
--Bruce Sterling