“Live and Let Die” The “newspeak” of a generation of moral relativists
What is the real issue regarding the Terri Schiavo case? At this point does anybody even care? It is likely that since the untimely demise of Mrs. Schiavo the news media aren’t the only ones to have forgotten about her, and in the process missed the point. I can already hear the loud and angry stampede on the horizon of well meaning folks rushing off to get living wills. As if the written incantation alone would exorcise the evil spirit of morality dwelling in the bodies of Right-to-lifers everywhere. This is decidedly not the issue.
Neither is the issue the sanctity of marriage. Although much could be said and has been said about the less than sanctimonious state of Michael and Terri’s “marriage.” Nor is it one of personhood, though there are those who would have the rest of us believe that level of dependency and self awareness are valid criteria for deciding not just the quality of one’s life, but whether or not an individual has the right to live that life. However, of late even the parameters used in determining the definition of “living” are in question.
When Larry King asked Michael Schiavo in a 2003 interview if he could take a news crew in to video tape Terri, he objected citing the old video tape evidence. In addition, his lawyer said that Terri had “a right to privacy.” That’s very interesting. She has a right to privacy, but she doesn’t have a right to live. However, this was never an issue of privacy in the first place. No. These arguments are really a smoke screen to keep us from thinking about the real issue: that the value of a human life does not derive from arbitrary criteria based on subjective evaluation. We are more than form and function. Our value is not based on our degree of viability. No one would argue that when my two-year-old son was an infant I had the right to kill him based on the fact he had little or no self-awareness and couldn’t feed himself. (O.K., I take that back. Peter Singer, the Chair of Bioethics at Princeton University would, and has made just such an argument.) In any case, degree of dependency should never be considered as criteria for making such a decision. If it were a valid litmus test for rights and personhood, we could easily make the same argument apply to those who are dependent upon heart pacemakers, insulin, and dialysis.
When Terri’s ventilator was removed, she continued to breathe. Should we have taken a pillow and suffocated her for it? Next food and hydration were removed under the auspices of “letting her die.” Food and hydration are not even in the same category as the former, since they do not constitute medical care. What we’ve done is confuse the method by which nutrients were being delivered to Terri’s body with medical treatment. In this case, it was a feeding tube. But whether a fork, spoon, straw, or some other man made device is used for the delivery of nutrients to the body is not the issue either. The bottom line is when the nutrients vital for Terri’s life were withheld we weren’t aiming to do her any favors. We weren’t aiming to just “let her die.” We were aiming to kill, and we hit our mark.
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