Thoughts on Terri Schiavo...

I had been trying to avoid talking about the Terri Schiavo issue, but given a discussion yesterday, I figure I might as well put my thoughts down in writing. It's a very difficult issue both to reason and explain.

First, I don't particularly think much of Michael Schiavo, however I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that his intense desire to kill his wife is out of love. I have no reason to believe otherwise. That he lives with another woman, has children with her, and is not on speaking terms with any of Terry's family doesn't inherently imply any impropriety on his part. But in my mind it doesn't speak well of him, either.

Ok, now to the heart of my sentiment. I find it deeply troubling if our society advocates the death of a person who is otherwise capable of surviving simply because we decide on an arbitrary threshold what life is worth living, and what is not.

Were this a case of an individual who was incapable of surviving on her own (ie life-support system-dependent), then I can understand to some degree the rationale for "pulling the plug." To do so, in effect, is letting nature take its course. But this is not the case with Terri Schiavo.

Schiavo is entirely self-sufficient and not on life-support. She merely needs food. In a physical sense, this requirement is a comparable physical condition as, say, an infant or an elderly person. If I am correct in assuming that starvation is not generally considered a 'natural occurrence' in modern society, then advocates of removing her feeding tube promote an unnatural (and awful) death for Schiavo. Her cause of death, afterall, will have no relation to her bodily condition, unless you are to argue that one's ability to feed oneself is a requirement for a right to live (though to do so is to promote the killing of children, the bed-ridden, the disabled, and the elderly, among others).

Now, a point can be made in saying that Schiavo's case is not quite the same as babies, etc. Babies and elderly people are, for example, more clearly cognizant of what is occurring around them. Ok, fair enough. They are not identical. But in Schiavo's case, she does indicate signs of awareness of people around her. Her eyes follow people around the room, she has been known to giggle, etc. She is not purely vegetative. At what threshold then should we deem a given level of cognizance worthy of life? What level is not? And who is qualified to make that determination?

Ultimately any decision on the matter is entirely arbitrary, including the person chosen to rule on the matter. And that the problem with the position. If all life is subject to arbitrary value, then all life is in danger of being defined out of acceptable status.

History is rife with the horrors of societies that used arbitrary values of acceptable life. Once we have chosen an arbitrary value, it is not difficult to imagine that we might further allow for re-definitions to allow for more killings simply because we -- individually or collectively -- decide that we wouldn't want to endure a particular state, so no one must.

I believe that we must always avoid the path of the arbitrary. Whether we consider a life to be worth living should always be entirely irrelevant to whether or not another being remains alive. This guides my thoughts on abortion, physician-assisted suicide, and in Terri Schiavo's case, state-sanctioned murder.

I suspect that I'll need to write more to fully articulate my thinking on all of this, so this is just a start. Any comments are welcome.

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Lastly, I close with a thought: Those who advocate killing Terri Schiavo often invoke it as an act of mercy. Why then, do they support the painful and terrible manner of starvation as a means to that end?

Wouldn't it make more sense to provide her with a lethal form of drugs, thus ending her life quickly and painlessly?

I haven't heard a reasonable answer for that yet. Has anyone?