The following is taken from “Technological Morality: The top ten bioethics stories of the decade,” by Wesley J. Smith, which appeared in National Review.

1. The dehydration of Terri Schiavo. The emotionally wrenching tug of war over the life of Terri Schiavo, covered sensationally by the international media and culminating in her slow death, was — hands down — the decade’s most important story in bioethics (as well of one of the most important stories of the early 2000s). Who hasn’t heard her name? Who doesn’t have an opinion about what happened? For a seeming eternity, the world groaned and argued bitterly about the weighty moral question of whether it is right to deprive a human being of food and water because he or she is profoundly cognitively impaired. Nearly five years after her death, we are not over it yet. Whenever a “miraculous awakening” story is reported, our minds and the media’s pens immediately come back to the question of whether that case is somehow “different” from Terri Schiavo’s.

It hasn’t stopped there. With Terri dead and buried, and with majority poll support, some of the most notable voices within bioethics and transplant medicine openly argue that persistently unconscious patients should, with consent of family, have their organs harvested — which results in death — or be used in research as if they were actually dead.

And with Obamacare coming full throttle, the question of whether the expenses required to care for these most helpless patients will continue to be borne has become a subject of acute bioethical attention.

Hubert Humphrey (among others) once said that a society is judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable citizens.

That truism explains why the Terri Schiavo case was far more than a personal and family tragedy: It was a modern-day passion play from which we are still reeling.

Part One