"Killing her for her own good"

An excellent piece by Lenny Cacchio:

It’s a messy situation, this Terri Schiavo case. It has become a tangled legal knot emotional, moral, and political thorn bushes, reinforced by accusations of abuse, improprieties, and raw evil.

I have my opinions about the motives of the Schindler’s and of Michael Schiavo, and you probably have yours. God knows their hearts and will be their judge. But here is something I don’t get: I do not understand why so many people want to see Terri Schiavo dead. And I do not understand the insistence on making her death a slow, lingering one. And I do not understand how this can be spun as “forcing” her to live versus “allowing” her to die. We have passed into an Orwellian world where death is freedom and starvation is compassion. As Isaiah said, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness.” (Isaiah 5:20 NIV)

Our cultural milieu substitutes the subjective “quality of life” for the nobility of the “sanctity of life”. At what point does one’s life lack enough quality to make it worth living, and who has the right to decide that? Some in this culture no longer defend the right to life and instead speak eloquently, if you have ears to hear, about the duty to die.

On August 3, 1941 Bishop Clemons von Galen stood in his pulpit in Nazi Germany and said, “For the past several months it has been reported that, on instructions from Berlin, patients who have been suffering for a long time from apparently incurable diseases have been forcibly removed from homes and clinics. Their relatives are later informed that the patient has died, that the body has been cremated and that the ashes may be claimed. There is little doubt that these numerous cases of unexpected death in the case of the insane are not natural, but often deliberately caused, and result from the belief that it is lawful to take away life which is unworthy of being lived.

“This ghastly doctrine tries to justify the murder of blameless men and would seek to give legal sanction to the forcible killing of invalids, cripples, the incurable and the incapacitated. I have discovered that the practice here in Westphalia is to compile lists of such patients who are removed elsewhere as ‘unproductive citizens,’ and after a period of time put to death. … ccording to some doctor, or because of the decision of some committee, they have no longer a right to live because they are ‘unproductive citizens’. The opinion is that since they can no longer make money, they are obsolete machines, comparable with some old cow that can no longer give milk or some horse that has gone lame. What is the lot of unproductive machines and cattle? They are destroyed.” (From Cardinal von Galen, by Heinrich Portman, English translation by RL Sedqwick, 1957, pp. 239-246. See Bishop Clemens August Count of Galen)

One must wonder if the duty to die crowd is applying the same calculus. Do we have the right to life because we are children made in God’s image? Or is our value to society a strict cost-benefit formula? Are we becoming what the Nazis envisioned, where a life is valued only if that life contributes to the cogs of the state?

Follow the dollar and sense where the winds are blowing. The question is whether ailing human beings cost society more than they contribute. Do the weakest among us have a claim upon humanity and therefore have a right to life even if they impose costs rather than benefits? Do people have a duty to die because their presence imposes an inconvenience on others?

These moral questions go beyond legalities and judiciaries, and speak to how we view the value of each member of the human race. The question has become one of convenience and finances. Personally, I prefer the country I once knew, where the right to life was more precious than the culture of death.