There’s an excellent interview on the Christianty Today website with John Kilner, President of the Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity. There are more materials from Kilner on the CBHD website.
Finally, here is a solidly Christian, yet balanced and reasonable, perspective on the Schiavo matter. Kilner argues that Terry Schiavo’s feeding tube should not have been withdrawn because of the material doubt about her medical status and the possible availability of other therapies that had not yet been tried. But, he avoids inflammatory rhetoric, and is careful to state that we can’t make overly broad statements about artificial nutrition and hydration based on this one difficult case. For example, he states:
Right now we have to be just a little more careful about sweeping statements about what we would do with nutrition and hydration. There are medical circumstances in a final dying process in which it’s not automatic that you do everything possible to put in the fluid and hydration….
He also notes that we must honor an individual’s clearly expressed wishes about medical treatment, even if we disagree with the person’s decisions:
[I]t is appropriate for us to honor their wishes even though it’s the wrong thing to do, because the person has responsibility for what can be inflicted on their body…. So you just kind of hold those two things together: We have to honor somebody’s wishes to refuse life-sustaining treatment, but we need to do everything possible to help them see that their life really is important and significant and that we’re willing to care for them.
I’m not sure I agree with everything Kilner has to say about the Schiavo case, but this is the kind of discussion I want to see from a Christian perspective: erudite, nuanced, balanced, and carefully thought out.