MAN, THE MORAL ANIMAL (Via Paul Cella)

Let Live or Make Die? (William Luse, Touchstone, March, 2005)

Now let us suppose one further thing: that I am wrong in this comparison of the two cases, most especially in that comparison of the nature of Reeve’s “fatal condition” with Terri’s, and of his ventilator with her tube. Where would that leave us as regards the essential difference between them?

I say it would leave us back where we started, among certain untutored college students who say that the difference between his awareness and hers makes all the difference in the world as to whether or not one ought to be allowed to live or made to die. We are back with Wesley Smith’s charge that those who choose the latter course do so based on an artificial distinction about one’s worth, one’s personhood, one’s “quality of life.” The witness of those students, and of the degreed Dr. Caplans, only serves to remind us of the effect on our judgment when one patient is fully conscious and of undiminished faculties and the other is not.

It is the same line of thinking that allows so many babies to be aborted: They are undeveloped, their capacity for a properly sensate, fully human experience is not yet present, and so, until they cross some very poorly defined line, they are placed at the mercy of others “in a position to judge.” That they do experience life at an age--appropriate level, that life itself is a continuum along which one must inhabit the earlier stages if he is ever to achieve the later, that, in short, you can’t get here without first having been there, does not seem to sway the opinions of many.[...]

Here is something I don’t get. If a murderer on death row were found to be suffering his execution by means of starvation—by our withholding from him food and drink—the ensuing uproar would occupy the national headlines and the shouted outrage of the television news until the injustice had been repaired and the warden and his foot soldiers brought to bar and thrown in prison. What would be cruel and unusual punishment for the murderer will be good enough for Terri.

That’s the world we live in now. We agonize over punishing the guilty, while throwing the innocent into Astarte’s fire. And it’s all legal. Where’s Sister Prejean when we need her? Terri Schiavo, being innocent of any crime save possession of a “life not worth living,” lacks star power. She doesn’t draw the crowds. She has no bad-girl swagger. There’s no glamour here, just a dead woman waking.

Proponents of euthanasia or “pulling the plug” often point to the assumed horror of being in a vegetative state but still somehow suffering. Their idea of compassion is to withdraw sustenance and submit them to a slow and agonizing death that would have horrified the Middle Ages. As Mr. Luse hints at in this terrific article, the real impulse behind euthanasia and abortion is the growing view that it is less morally offensive to kill anyone who is dependant and incapable of objecting.