Drop your own bias for a moment and see who is saying that. It is the author of the article pointed to by the link, a Harvard student with celebral palsy whose doctor decided at birth that he would also be better off dead. Fortunately for him, his family doctor saved his life.

There are a lot of handicapped people who see attitudes like yours as bigotry. They openly fear that people like you will one day decide they too will be better off dead. Perhaps they're right.

A few examples:

No; It's Not About Terri Schiavo Anymore

The disability rights movement I cover is made up of individuals who themselves are living lives that they may not have been able to previously imagine. Individuals who can communicate only via technology -- who, without today's computers, might very well be thought to have little or no cognitive ability. Several of these people, in fact, contribute regularly to Ragged Edge Online. There are people who have experienced aphasia. There are people with brain injuries.

To these people, the case of Terri Schiavo looks very different.

They are particularly angered by the belief that Michael Schiavo knows what Terri Schiavo wants. "We didn't know what Terri wanted," Michael Schiavo told Larry King on Friday. "But this is what we want."

This isn't about Terri Schiavo anymore.

On New Year's Eve a few years back, 74-year-old Shirley Harrison's husband came into the hospital where she'd been brought after having a stroke. He shot her three times in the chest. News media reported it as a "mercy killing."

Three weeks after Nancy Draper's body was found in the freezer of their home, husband Larry Draper turned himself in to police, saying he killed his wife to end her suffering from multiple sclerosis. He received a reduced sentence.

Joseph Brosz, 84, apparently bludgeoned to death Sylvia Brosz, 56, described as his "mentally and physically disabled daughter."

And we all remember Jack Kevorkian, and those who thought the man was doing good. Many of us still think that.

Villanova University history professor Mine Ener used a 12-inch kitchen knife to slice the throat of her daughter, 6-month-old Raya Donagi, who had Down syndrome. Firefighters responding to a house fire in Elwood, Indiana found the burned body of 8-year-old Mark Adrian Norris II. Autopsy results confirmed that Mark, who had cerebral palsy and epilepsy, had actually died the day before -- of malnourishment and neglect. His mother was not charged with murder.

And in England last month, the news was full of the trial of military security specialist Andrew Wragg, who told police he killed his 10 year old son, Jacob, because he was frustrated that his son was no longer able to recognize and communicate with him. Jurors were told he was embarrassed at having a son with a disability.

Not Dead at All - Why Congress was right to stick up for Terri Schiavo

My emotional response is powerful, but at bottom it's not important. It's no more important than anyone else's, not what matters. The things that ought to matter have become obscured in our communal clash of gut reactions. Here are 10 of them:

1. Ms. Schiavo is not terminally ill. She has lived in her current condition for 15 years. This is not about end-of-life decision-making. The question is whether she should be killed by starvation and dehydration.

2. Ms. Schiavo is not dependent on life support. Her lungs, kidneys, heart, and digestive systems work fine. Just as she uses a wheelchair for mobility, she uses a tube for eating and drinking. Feeding Ms. Schiavo is not difficult, painful, or in any way heroic. Feeding tubes are a very simple piece of adaptive equipment, and the fact that Ms. Schiavo eats through a tube should have nothing to do with whether she should live or die.

3. This is not a case about a patient's right to refuse treatment. I don't see eating and drinking as "treatment," but even if they are, everyone agrees that Ms. Schiavo is presently incapable of articulating a decision to refuse treatment. The question is who should make the decision for her, and whether that substitute decision-maker should be authorized to kill her by starvation and dehydration.

4. There is a genuine dispute as to Ms. Schiavo's awareness and consciousness. But if we assume that those who would authorize her death are correct, Ms. Schiavo is completely unaware of her situation and therefore incapable of suffering physically or emotionally. Her death thus can't be justified for relieving her suffering.

5. There is a genuine dispute as to what Ms. Schiavo believed and expressed about life with severe disability before she herself became incapacitated; certainly, she never stated her preferences in an advance directive like a living will. If we assume that Ms. Schiavo is aware and conscious, it is possible that, like most people who live with severe disability for as long as she has, she has abandoned her preconceived fears of the life she is now living. We have no idea whether she wishes to be bound by things she might have said when she was living a very different life. If we assume she is unaware and unconscious, we can't justify her death as her preference. She has no preference.

There are 5 more good reasons in the article, written by a handicapped woman who knows that a feeding tube is in her future, too.

And back to the original article that started this thread (and I doubt you bothered to read it), Bigotry and the Murder of Terri Schiavo

Our country has learned that we cannot judge people on the basis of minority status, but for some reason we have not erased our prejudice against disability. One insidious form of this bias is to distinguish cognitively disabled persons from persons whose disabilities are “just” physical. Cognitively disabled people are shown a manifest lack of respect in daily life, as well. This has gotten so perturbing to me that when I fly, I try to wear my Harvard t-shirt so I can “pass” as a person without cognitive disability. (I have severe cerebral palsy, the result of being deprived of oxygen at birth. While some people with cerebral palsy do have cognitive disability, my articulation difference and atypical muscle tone are automatically associated with cognitive disability in the minds of some people.)

The result of this disrespect is the devaluation of lives of people like Terri Schiavo. In the Schiavo case and others like it, non-disabled decision makers assert that the disabled person should die because he or she—ordinarily a person who had little or no experience with disability before acquiring one—“would not want to live like this.” In the Schiavo case, the family is forced to argue that Terri should be kept alive because she might “get better”—that is, might be able to regain or to communicate her cognitive processes. The mere assertion that disability (particularly cognitive disability, sometimes called “mental retardation”) is present seems to provide ample proof that death is desirable.

Essentially, then, we have arrived at the point where we starve people to death because he or she cannot communicate their experiences to us. What is this but sheer egotism? Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, this is obviously an attempt to play God.

Not Dead Yet, an organization of persons with disabilities who oppose assisted suicide and euthanasia, maintains that the starvation and dehydration of Terri Schiavo will put the lives of thousands of severely disabled children and adults at risk. (The organization takes its name from the scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail in which a plague victim not dying fast enough is hit over the head and carted away after repeatedly insisting he is not dead yet.) Not Dead Yet exposes important biases in the “right to die” movement, including the fact that as early as 1988, Jack Kevorkian advertised his intention of performing medical experimentation (“hitherto conducted on rats”) on living children with spina bifida, at the same time harvesting their organs for reuse.

From the perspective of Joe Ford, the young handicapped author, Nazi is as Nazi does. Is he wrong? Having a handicapped brother and a severely handicapped friend, it does concern me when so many people are so quick to write off the lives of people whose lives might not be "worth living", at least in the minds of some.

As Joe Lieberman, Ralph Nader, and Jesse Jackson have pointed out, it isn't simply a "right wing" issue to be concerned about the rights of the weak and helpless. After all, one of the best measures of a society is how it treats the most helpless and powerless of its citizens.