The travail and triumph of Sidney Greenspan

The question of whether a feeding-tube could be withdrawn from Sidney Greenspan, a man who had survived in a Chicago nursing home for six years in a vegetative state, has focused ethical and legal deliberation on the issue of whether Illinois will follow the tradition of cases of court-sanctioned withdrawal (Quinlan, Fox, Conroy, Jobes, et al) or the more ambiguous precedents of Longeway and Cruzan, which disallowed withdrawal.