KILL YOU/SAVE ME:

Profound questions from the Schiavo case (Katherine Kersten, June 16, 2005, Minneapolis Star Tribune)

"Brother Michael Gaworski and I founded the Franciscan Brothers in 1982," says Brother Paul, a gentle, soft-spoken man, speaking in his friary's spartan, book-lined living room in St. Paul. "We wanted to work with the poor and vulnerable -- the homeless, the elderly, the unborn."

In 1991 Brother Michael was stricken with bacterial pneumonia at the age of 32. His fellow brothers cared for their beloved founder, in a condition similar to Schiavo's, for more than 12 years at the friary until he died in 2003.

Shortly after Brother Michael's death, Brother Paul met Bobby Schindler. "Bobby showed me a video of Terri," says Brother Paul, "and the similarities with Brother Michael were striking. We quickly became very close." When the Schindlers' court battles drew media attention, Brother Paul went to Florida to offer support and eventually became the family spokesman.

Schiavo's case was wrenchingly complex. Brother Paul said Wednesday that the autopsy report, indicating that Schiavo's brain damage was so severe no improvement in her condition was possible, makes no difference.

"She was not dying, she was not on life support," he said. Terri needed just food and water -- what anyone needs to live -- like thousands of other incapacitated people with no hope of improvement: among them, adults with advanced Alzheimer's and children with severe cerebral palsy. [...]

"People contemplate a seriously disabled person" -- like a quadriplegic --"and say, 'Who would want to live that way?' The answer, of course, is no one. But when people actually become disabled, they often discover a meaning in life that they never could have anticipated."

People of goodwill may disagree about Terri Schiavo's case. Yet as our society strays from its traditional belief in the essential dignity of every human life, we all must grapple with the implications of the notion that some lives are "not worth living."

Today, assisted suicide is lawful in Oregon. In the Netherlands, according to the New York Times, prosecutors no longer pursue cases against doctors who kill severely impaired babies after birth. The temptation to deal with the defective and incompetent by eliminating them is likely to grow as our society ages. Today, approximately 4.5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease. In coming decades, projections suggest that about 40 percent of us will spend roughly 10 years in an infirm, demented condition. The way we deal with this situation will say much about us as a society.

Currently, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., is staging an exhibit that offers food for thought on this issue. The exhibit is called "Deadly Medicine: Creating the Master Race." It examines the idea of "lebensunwertes Leben" -- lives not worthy of life --which the Nazis used to justify their elimination of thousands deemed unfit to live: the retarded, the defective and the seriously ill.

Wouldn''t want to get in the way of the march of Reason and Science.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 17, 2005 12:00 AM