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Saturday, March 26, 2005Mercy Killing?So another appeal has been rejected. And it looks like the process is coming to an end. Those on the one side are rightly horrified by what they perceive as a murder in progress. What about those on the other side? We've heard that Mr. Schiavo is overcome with concern for this matter, is adamant that his wife's desire not to languish on life support be honored. Leave aside his new lady, and his two children with her. Leave aside whether Schiavo should have had anything to do with this since his bolder steps to move on. Terri Schiavo's skin is flaking. Her tongue and eyes are said to be bleeding. Bit by bit, one by one, the systems of her body are failing. A half-dozen well wishers were arrested trying to bring her water. This is mercy? If the advocates of Terri Schiavo's death are true to their stated desires, the lady will die very soon. Will die not in a week from starvation but overnight from a morphine overdose. An unfortunate miscalculation of what was needed to stem pain, whatever it takes to end a truly awful misery. We have heard much about the angst and anguish of those wishing this end. If they have courage, they will now hasten it and stand forthrightly for what they have always stood for - the conviction that since, in their view, Terri Schiavo's life was not worth living, it ought to be taken away. I fear, however, that we will not see such moral courage. To stand alongside Terri while wishing that life may yet be found within her is one route. There is another route, with which I disagree, but which is defensible at least on its own terms, and that is to declare that there is no real life to be found and that the body should finally be separated from a life whose spirit has departed. As I see, it's not my position, but it's internally coherent and represents the logical conclusion of the thinking of those who wanted to pull the feeding tube. Alas, I fear that Terri's defenselessness will be abused to the last. That is, though there are those who deeply wish her death, they will lack the nerve to be its author, allowing a living, breathing human to starve to death for inability to feed herself, so that after watching her waste away they can write upon the death certificate, "natural causes." They say that success has many fathers, failure has none. It is curious, then, that if Schiavo's death is such a needful thing, none of the parties for it have found the nerve to step forward, say so forthrightly and volunteer for explicit parentage of the act to make it so. 
posted by gbarto at 11:03 PM |
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