In response to last week’s article, Pulling the plug a humane decision, I would like to provide you with the facts about Terri Schiavo’s case. First, Terri Schiavo is living. She suffered brain damage after she mysteriously collapsed in 1990 and won a malpractice suit that ensured availability of lifetime treatment. She is not in a vegetative state, and has been able to respond to her parents with her eyes, by smiling, and by physical movement of her body-as videotaped evidence shows. She has even tried to talk to her parents. Recently, her husband Michael had petitioned a Florida court to remove her feeding tube. She is not and had not been on a respirator, as the Villanovan article had claimed. Therefore, this is a case of a husband making legal advances to starve and to dehydrate his wife by having her feeding tube removed. To save their child from this slow and excruciating death by starvation, Terri’s parents have fought to keep her alive. They, along with her relatives, have offered to take responsibility for Terri’s care, but Michael will not relinquish guardianship. Only by Governor Bush’s commendable intercession has Terri been put back on the feeding tube, and she is living today. Maybe not “living” by the Villanovans editor’s standards for life that include having “loved, lost, been defeated, rebounded, and triumphed,” but Terri certainly has remained her parents’ child and a loved one who her relatives have come to visit in her time of trouble. I ask you: Should very young children have their mothers stop feeding them because they haven’t gained humanity yet through experience or ability? Who, then, deserves to be fed? To clarify what Pope John Paul II has said concerning this “right to die” policy, he-in 1998-made a statement that “emphasized that the omission of nutrition and hydration intended to cause a patient’s death must be rejected” (http://www.wf-f.org/03-3valko.html). It is shameful that a newspaper on a Catholic campus or anywhere would report: “Schiavo may be alive, but she is certainly not living.” I ask you: Who, then, has the right to live? No matter. Whatever your answer is, editor, I am glad that you are not the one deciding whether or not I deserve access to food and the right to life.