"Still Beautiful, Still Human"

A Wall Street Journal reporter gives an account of her struggle to keep her severely disabled mother alive.

It's a moving story. One takeaway point:

In the wake of the Terri Schiavo ordeal, we are now treated to published accounts of children recalling how they denied their own parents nutrition. "Defining deviancy down" was the phrase coined by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to describe a society that had lost its moral compass and lowered its capacity for outrage. The phrase seems perfect to describe the middle- and upper-middle-class children who have surfaced to boast of how they ended their parents' lives--as if it had been somehow an act of valor. It is also a chillingly apt description of a society that, in the name of the law, forces a young woman to die of thirst and to starve even as we watch.

The commonality of this practice simply makes it a more vicious and tenacious foe; it does not, and can never, make it right.