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The Human Argument For Terri Schiavo.

[BUMPED TO TOP]

Alice Chasan, writing at beliefnet.com (via realclearpolitics.com), has a fantastic piece on why Americans care so much about the Terri Schiavo story:

Her eyes are open.

Maybe that single, startling fact has helped transform the battle over whether to remove Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube from one family’s tragic conflict into a dilemma for the national conscience. After all, psychologists have shown in study after study that adults and children are drawn to faces—both human and animal—with wide eyes that call out to us. Our reflexive urge is to protect....

Terri Schiavo came to public attention initially because of the legal battle between her husband and her parents. But her story stayed with us ordinary people, not just the ideological warriors—despite the welter of other concerns we move through in our daily lives. Something more than media manipulation is at play, pulling a surprising range of people of all faiths and no faith to one side or the other of the tug of war between the Schindlers and Michael Schiavo....

Stripped of its legal trappings, Terri Schiavo’s mystery is our mystery, the one we try to avoid most of the time. It’s about how we measure the inherent value of a particular life—your particular life or mine.

Terri Schiavo can’t speak for herself. Into the silence, we project our deepest anxieties about existence and significance. We all wrestle with the meaning of our lives, but we’re rarely called upon to quantify it or justify our existence before the court of public opinion. So Terri Schiavo becomes a surrogate for our self-evaluation on some cosmic scale. How would I weigh in if my life hung in the balance?

Indeed, the hubbub we're seeing right now is not about Terri exclusively. It is about how our society values life.

Powerline blog points out this David Gelernter piece from OpinionJournal.com, October 2003:

...who dares say you have no right to commune with your gravely ill child? To comfort your child? To pray for your child? Who dares say you have no right to hope that she will recover no matter what the doctors say? Who dares say you have no right to comfort, commune with and pray for her even if you have given up hope? Yes, the woman is mortally ill. Who dares say that her life is therefore worthless, to be cut off at her husband's whim?

....

The frightening question is: What happens to the next Mrs. Schiavo? And the next plus a hundred or a thousand? How much attention will the public and the Legislature be able to muster for this sort of thing over the years? The war against Judeo-Christian morality is a war of attrition. Time is on the instigators' side. They have all the patience in the world, and all the patients. If this one lives, there is always the next. After all, it's the principle of the thing....

Thoughtful people have argued: Once you start footnoting innocent human life, you are in trouble. Innocent life must not be taken, unless (here come the footnotes) the subject is too small, sick or depressed to complain. One footnote, people have argued, and the jig is up; in the long run the accumulating footnotes will strangle humane society like algae choking a pond.

Who would have believed when the Supreme Court legalized abortion that one generation later, only one, America would have come to this? Mrs. Schiavo's parents wanting her to live, pleading for her to live, the state saying no, and a meeting of the Legislature required to pry the executioner's fingers from the victim's throat?

I would never have made such an argument when the abortion decision came down, and I would never have believed it. I still can't believe it. Is this America? Do I wake or sleep?

UPDATE:
Polipundit has more coverage.

So does LaShawn Barber.

UPDATE 2:

Blogs for Terri has more, and it doesn't look good.

UPDATE 3:

Peggy Noonan has a column up on OpinionJournal.com:

But in the end, it comes down to this: Why kill her? What is gained? What is good about it? Ronald Reagan used to say, in the early days of the abortion debate, when people would argue that the fetus may not really be a person, he'd say, "Well, if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something's in it and you don't know if it's alive, you don't kick it, do you?" No, you don't.

So Congress: don't kick it. Let her live.

UPDATE 4:
Wizbang has more coverage.

UPDATE 5 [with bump to top]:

Tom DeLay speaks out:

WASHINGTON - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) today condemned the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube and pledged to continue working for a legal or legislative means to save her life.

"Right now, murder is being committed against a defenseless American citizen in Florida," DeLay said. "Terri Schiavo's feeding tube should be immediately replaced, and Congress will continue working to explore ways to save her.

"Mrs. Schiavo's life is not slipping away - it is being violently wrenched from her body in an act of medical terrorism," DeLay said. "Mr. Schiavo's attorney's characterization of the premeditated starvation and dehydration of a helpless woman as 'her dying process' is as disturbing as it is unacceptable. What is happening to her is not compassion - it is homicide. She doesn't need to die, and as long as Terri Schiavo can breathe and her supporters can pray, we will not rest."

Posted by Will Franklin · 18 March 2005 05:19 PM

Comments

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