Am I missing something here or is the starvation of Terri Schiavo by court order in Florida an abomination which everyone who cares about human life should abhor? How is it ever justifiable to starve someone deliberately and actively because one thinks their human life is not worth saving asks Vincent Browne.
Yes, I know we starve millions of people around the world daily and have little moral compunction about that. But do we deliberately deprive them of food with the intention of starving them to death?
Is there not a clear moral difference between letting people die and doing something that causes them to die? For instance, is there not a clear difference between sending starving people poisoned food with the intention of killing them and not sending food at all, knowing that by not doing so they will die?
The courts in Florida have justified the removal of the feeding tube from Terri Schiavo on the grounds that this is her own wish. But the only evidence they have had of this is that of her husband, who says that in conversations before she became disabled she said this would be her wish.
Even if one were to accept his evidence of her previous wishes, how do we know that this is her wish now, and even if we accept she is not capable of forming a wish now, how do we or anyone know that this would be her wish in the hard real circumstances of life or death?
And on the argument that her life is not worth living: who decides when life is not worth living, or rather who decides for others that their lives are not worth living?
Even if she is in what is known as a vegetative state, she is still a human being with human rights. There are many people with severe intellectual impairment who are also deemed vegetative. Are they all candidates for extinction by those who deem their lives not worth living?
Indeed, many people think the lives of many disadvantaged people not worth living. Are they entitled to ordain the ending of these "worthless" lives?
I think there is a valid distinction between affording a person with severe intellectual impairment normal means of subsistence - food and shelter, for instance - and going to extraordinary means to keep them alive through radical medical intervention.
I don't think there is an obligation on us as individuals, or communally, to intervene in that radical way. But depriving such people of the means of subsistence?
Were it the case that nobody wanted to care for Terri Schiavo any longer, there might be an argument that the state is not obliged to provide subsistence for such people (I do not accept that proposition, incidentally) but in this instance that is not the case. Her parents want to do this and her parents want her alive, for to them, while living, she remains a precious daughter. So what is a court doing granting an order permitting the removal of the feeding tube?
The suggestion, however, that this case parallels the arguments on abortion seems to me to be misguided.
The abortion controversy essentially involves the proposition that the coercive power of the state should be invoked to require a woman to give her body to the sustenance of another person (that is accepting that the foetus is a person) irrespective of her wishes, irrespective of whether she consented to the conception and irrespective of the mental and physical consequences to her of requiring her to do so.
Abortion may involve the destruction of innocent human life, but the only means of maintaining that life revolves on the willingness of the mother to sustain that life, and that is very often not present. Use of coercive force to require the mother to sustain that life seems to me an unjustifiable infringement of her autonomy, her right to determine how her own body should be used.
There is no parallel in the Schiavo case. Nobody's autonomy is being infringed to keep Terri Schiavo alive. Indeed her autonomy may be infringed by the supposition that her wish would be to die.
And the manner of that death seems cruel. Depriving a human being, even an animal, of food and water seems an act of gross abuse.
What is it in our culture that there is not outrage over this?
The sneering references to the hypocrisy of George Bush over his support for the Schiavo parents and his reference to erring on the side of life in the context of his murderous war on Iraq, his cavalier use of the death penalty when he was governor of Texas and his cutbacks on Medicare, are neither here nor there.
Why should George Bush's consistency or inconsistency be a measure of moral action?
Odd, isn't it, that the Catholic Church should be so quiescent?