Andrew Sullivan: An age-old moral lifeline out of the Terri Schiavo tormen

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Andrew Sullivan: An age-old moral lifeline out of the Terri Schiavo torment

Sunday Times

A century ago Terri Schiavo would have died almost instantly from her original brain collapse, prompted by chronic bulimia. In a bizarre irony she would have died because she refused to administer sufficient nutrition for her body. Last week she died because others were forced to assume the same responsibility with which she had once struggled.

But the question remains: was Schiavo killed or allowed to die? It seems to me that the absolutists in both camps miss something important. Those who argue that she was in effect already dead miss what is best described as the dignity of the human person — even when incapacitated. What makes someone human is not the extent of their capacities but their humanness itself. While a human being breathes on her own and her bodily functions remain largely intact despite massive degeneration in the brain, she is still a human being. Moral sense tells us so.

But our moral sense also tells us that when a person’s condition is such that she cannot in effect feel, think, eat or drink on her own and her survival depends on a sophisticated method of medical nutrition and pharmaceutical support, it is clear that she is not alive as even the tiniest foetus is alive.

When she has been in a vegetative state for a decade and a half, when there is not the faintest hope for her recovery, her life is in effect over, even as she lives. A foetus has a future as a full human being; Schiavo didn’t for years. She could never be what she once was.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-1552068,00.html

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1. Must disagree Andy

Terri Schiavo was not "in effect" dead, she was actually dead. Her higher brain functions had ceased many years ago. It is those functions that determine our humanity, not breathing and pumping blood.

To suggest that the dignity of the human person rests primarily with its bodily functions demeans that dignity. Death is not an incapacity and make no mistake that Mrs. Schiavo's brain was dead.

[hlthe2b]

2. It is hard to argue with you on a philosophical level, but perhaps he

is walking the line around legal death, the criteria for which, she did not meet.

What caught my eye was his comment "condition is such that she cannot in effect feel, think, eat or drink on her own and her survival depends on a sophisticated method of medical nutrition and pharmaceutical support, it is clear that she is not alive as even the tiniest foetus is alive." If one is to be absolutely honest, a fetus can not eat or drink on their own for the majority of the gestation period, which is why they meet the strictest definition of "parasite," in biologic terms. (A comment that while technically true, incited a flamewar when someone made it quite innocently and with incredible qualification a year or so ago). But, Sullivan does underscore the imporant issue: that until the fetus reaches sufficient brain and organ development to allow it to survive outside the "host," the differences seem most underscored by the "promise of future development."