There is a fundamental difference, however, between asking to be permitted to keep a vegetative relative on costly machinery, and asking the taxpayers or society as a whole to pay for such machinery.

Marriage is like a series of opposing reflections, inverse images getting ever smaller like nesting dolls, each one of your trying to squeeze yourself smaller to fit inside the hopes of the other, until one of you cracks or stops existing.

Depression and hopelessness are not the only reasons terminally ill patients wish to end their lives. Many individuals see nothing undignified about choosing to end their lives at the time and manner of their choosing - and many view such a choice as the meaningful culmination of a good life.

The only thing more difficult than persuading someone else to start having sex with you is persuading yourself to stop.

Victory [over homophobia] may require five or maybe 20 years. Yet I have no doubt that "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex adoption bans will be as unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being.

Such is the demographic paradox of a junior physician's relationship with his patients: I worry about how to extend their lives. This anxiety inevitably shortens my own.

While the visible victims may draw the headlines and attract indignant protests from so-called "pro-life" organizations, the invisible victims are people like you and me who will suffer from diseases that are never cured because funds are being poured down a healthcare sieve in order to maintain permanently-unconscious bodies on complex and costly forms of life support.