Since Terri Schiavo's 1990 heart attack she has lain in a Florida hospital in what doctors have described as, and state courts have found to be, a "persistent vegetative state" with no prospect of recovery.
This, the Florida Supreme Court has found, "is not simply a coma. [Mrs Schiavo] is not asleep ... Medicine cannot cure this condition". Her brain function is virtually non-existent.
Since 1998, when her husband Michael Schiavo, against the wishes of her parents Bob and Mary Schindler, sought the permission of the courts to end the active medical intervention which has kept her in this ghastly limbo between life and death, her fate has been the subject of a week-long trial, a seven-day hearing, at least 14 appeals, motions, petitions, and five suits in the federal courts. All the way the courts have sided with the husband and found, as the Florida Supreme Court put it, that Terri Schiavo "would elect to cease life-prolonging procedures if she were competent to make her own decisions".
She has been the subject of special legislation at both Florida and federal level, most recently when Republicans rushed through a bill earlier this week allowing federal review of the Florida decision on February 25th to permit the withdrawal of hydration and nutrition. A federal court then declined to further intervene, a position endorsed by the Supreme Court. And early yesterday, for the second time this week, US District Judge James Whittemore rejected a request from the Schindlers to have the feeding tubes reconnected. Their lawyers immediately filed a notice of appeal of his decision with the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which had already rejected the case earlier this week.
It is now eight days since Ms Shiavo's feeding tubes were removed and with all legal and political remedies available to her parents apparently exhausted, Ms Schiavo is likely to slip gently into death within days.
And that is as it should be, sad though it may be. Terri Schiavo's fundamental right to bodily integrity must surely include the right to die with dignity, to fulfil her wish - as acknowledged by the courts repeatedly - to say to doctors that they must draw a line between their duty to save life and an overzealous desire to cling to "life" after it has lost all real meaning and quality.
Ms Schiavo's tragic story, made more painful by the bitter divisions within the family, has also been exacerbated by many of the excesses and defects of the American interface between media, politics and the law: from the deeply unfair tabloid demonisation of her husband, to the extraordinary inability of the US legal system to reach finality, and the political cynicism of Republican "right-to-life" advocates, ostensibly also last-ditch defenders of the cause of states' rights. "My party is demonstrating that they are for states' rights unless they don't like what states are doing," Representative Christopher Shays (Connecticut) has said tellingly, one of only five House Republicans who voted against the bill.
Terri Schiavo must now be allowed to die in peace.