Re: Terri Schiavo -WSJ today, and Rambi's background find earlier----
[ This Yale Professor brings up some interesting questions ... I also wonder who is paying the bills...is Ms. Schiavo a ward of the State now? The money from the long ago law suit appears to be gone. At what point do some folks it's alright to kill a person who appears to recognize people...(see the link from Rambi below)... Did Terri's husband ever divorce her? If not, why not? If he has been living with another woman, and they have two children, why hasn't he divorced? Is there money waiting for him? What a terrible case. And certainly hope it reminds every one to get their Living Will in order. ]
Terri Schiavo's Life
By DAVID GELERNTER
COMMENTARY
WSJ
The death-by-starvation facing Terri Schiavo was averted yesterday when the Florida legislature passed a bill letting Gov. Jeb Bush intervene to save her life. Mrs. Schiavo has been severely mentally disabled since her heart stopped for a time in 1990. Although doctors have called her condition "vegetative," she breathes on her own, her eyes are open and in video clips she appears to respond with smiles to the sound of her mother's voice. That is one ground on which her parents have pleaded with authorities to let their daughter live. But last week her husband ordered her feeding tube removed, and until the legislature acted, Gov. Bush had no authority to override Michael Schiavo's decision.
Mrs. Schiavo's parents believe that she knows them and is comforted by them. They believe they are communing with their daughter. (Given my own experience with the gravely ill and the dying, I will take the parents' word over the doctors' any day.)
And who dares say you have no right to commune with your gravely ill child? To comfort your child? To pray for your child? Who dares say you have no right to hope that she will recover no matter what the doctors say? Who dares say you have no right to comfort, commune with and pray for her even if you have given up hope? Yes, the woman is mortally ill. Who dares say that her life is therefore worthless, to be cut off at her husband's whim?
Perhaps you believe that those who are suffering, or choose death, or are wholly unconscious, have a "right" to die -- but those arguments don't apply to Mrs Schiavo. They are irrelevant here. Except -- not quite irrelevant. After all, those are the arguments that have brought us, as a society, to a state where we contemplate killing Mrs. Schiavo before her parents' eyes, maybe (for all we know) as she smiles right at them.
The rabbis speak often of the crucial religious obligation of visiting and comforting the sick. They derive the requirement directly from what they call the "greatest principle of Torah," a certain verse in Leviticus: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." God Himself is said to have visited ailing Abraham. When you visit sick people, your most important duty is to pray for their recovery. Such an act matters profoundly not only to the sick but (as a positive religious obligation) to the visitor, and the society he represents. "He who visits a sick man," Maimonides writes, "is as though he would take away part of his sickness and lighten his pain." Who dares deprive parents of that right?
When we have condemned a criminal to death, it is remarkable how patient we are in extending his life. So long as there are legal paths to follow, we follow them; and the courts are apt to postpone the execution. Both aspects of the process speak well for us: that we are willing (however painful it may be for us -- and it gets more painful every year) to execute murderers; and that we are in no hurry to, and will search on and on for a convincing reason not to.
With the likes of Mrs. Schiavo, we are a lot less patient. The governor can grant a stay of execution when a condemned murderer's life is on the line. Mrs. Schiavo's stay required that the whole Florida legislature mobilize for action. The frightening question is: What happens to the next Mrs. Schiavo? And the next plus a hundred or a thousand? How much attention will the public and the legislature be able to muster for this sort of thing over the years? The war against Judeo-Christian morality is a war of attrition. Time is on the instigators' side. They have all the patience in the world, and all the patients. If this one lives, there is always the next. After all, it's the principle of the thing.
For years, thoughtful people have argued that "reasons for taking a human life" should not be treated as a growing list. There are valid reasons to do it, and they have been agreed for millennia. If the list has to change, better to shorten than lengthen it.
* * *
Thoughtful people have argued: Once you start footnoting innocent human life, you are in trouble. Innocent life must not be taken . . . unless (here come the footnotes) the subject is too small, sick, or depressed to complain. One footnote, people have argued, and the jig is up; in the long run the accumulating footnotes will strangle humane society like algae choking a pond.
Who would have believed when the Supreme Court legalized abortion that, one generation later, only one, America would have come to this? Mrs. Schiavo's parents wanting her to live, pleading for her to live, the state saying no, and a meeting of the legislature required to pry the executioner's fingers from the victim's throat?
I would never have made such an argument when the abortion decision came down, and I would never have believed it. I still can't believe it. Is this America? Do I wake or sleep?
Mr. Gelernter is a professor at Yale and the author, most recently, of "The Muse in the Machine" (Free Press, 2002).
Updated October 22, 2003
Message 19423930 - from Mr. h2o
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Message 19411675
Background link courtesy Rambi---- |
