Menage à Trois Bingo

I've been trying to avoid writing about the Terri Schiavo case. But I
find that instead, I'm talking to everyone I know about it. It seems to
me there are two fundamental issues involved: when does life end, and
secondly, if her life has not already ended by your understanding, is
preventing her life's end truly the greatest good? They're both
important questions and deserving of more thoughtful debate than the
media, Congress, and the President have given them. There is room for
disagreement, of course, but differences of opinion should not be cause
for slander.

And last night, I read the most succinct expression of my feelings on
the matter: "God's been trying to call her home for fifteen years. Why
won't they let her go?" from Alan (no LJ) via leenoox's blog. It's a soundbite, and
intentionally uses religious phrasing to tweak the religious people on
the other side, but it closely touches one of the things that has been
troubling me since the issue resurfaced.

Granting the premise that human beings have individual distinct souls, I
can see only two possibilities. Either her soul is trapped in a prison
of a body, with no way to connect to any other human or to the world
around her--we have years of court judgments agreeing that the evidence
shows she would not have wanted this form of "life"--or her soul has
already moved on, and what remains here is no more alive in any useful
sense than a corpse, breathing or no. Either way, letting her go seems
both the only realistic response to the situation and the only kind one.

I am actually not sure whether people *have* souls in a religious sense,
but when I think about "what is 'me'" I am certain that self-awareness
is required. There's a tautology for you. But it is meaningful, too; if
my brain were to be so severely damaged that I no longer had
self-awareness, then I believe I will have effectively died. There would
be no "I". My body would be useful only as a source of organ donations.
The trouble of course is figuring out whether or not someone is
self-aware. But even if they remained self-aware, but trapped in a state
where they could not connect in any way to the world around me...isn't
that just like solitary confinement in jail? No one can remain sane and
mentally stable when left in solitary confinement for fifteen years! Let
them out!

I just read a thought-provoking column from a
Jesuit theologian, who points out that the religious right's fanatic
adherence to "Life" as the ultimate good is actually a heresy. Whatever
happened to heaven? God made death, too.

The more I think about it, I'm even inclined to wonder what is so wrong
with euthanasia in a case like this. If the person has died, then
ending the bodily function ought to be done as quickly and gently as
possible.

A number of other important issues are involved as well: who are her
family, anyway, and should outsiders intervene in decisions about her
care?

Why is it that her parents are "her family" when the commentators agree
with them, and no one that I've seen on either side of the issue calls
*him* her family. She chose to marry him, after all; isn't that the most
widely-accepted version of choosing one's family that there is? "He
shall leave his father and mother and cleave unto his wife."

I'm greatly annoyed by the commentators who are calling Michael Schiavo
an "estranged husband", saying things like "no judge should give an
estranged husband like [him] the time of day". How can he be anything
but estranged from someone who isn't even there? In as much as we can
tell, he is doing what he believes she would have wanted, against a huge
onslaught of opposition. One writer in the USA Today had the audacity to
get hot under the collar on Terri's behalf because he is "leaving his
shoes under another woman's dust ruffle" and announce that if Terri were
aware, she'd be upset about that. How can the writer know that? I find
that to be a cynical, ad hominem attack that does nothing but demonize
Michael Schiavo. Ironic, really, that 'cynical' seems to be their
favorite adjective to describe him.