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.

This is how most stories end in the hospital. Not with crash carts and sirens and electric shocks to the chest, but with an empty room, a crisp white bed, silence.

Much as we do not permit convicted pedophiles to teach kindergarten or convicted hijackers to board airplanes, common sense dictates that individuals who have been imprisoned for plotting violence against abortion clinics should never again be permitted anywhere near such facilities.

I am grateful that I have rights in the proverbial public square - but, as a practical matter, my most cherished rights are those that I possess in my bedroom and hospital room and death chamber.

I would prefer to believe that a market in fetal organs would empower women to use their reproductive capabilities to their own economic advantage.

I used to dream of true love; now I'm open to false, but convincing.

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.