March 27, 2005
Terry Schiavo and ethics
I will humbly say I may well be wrong about this, but it seems to me from the video clips shown on cable news that Terri Schiavo smiles when she sees her mother.
One detects the light of a simple happiness in that reaction, not some random reflex.
In 2003 when Terri's feeding tube was first removed, and I read about the case, it did not seem such a big deal. If she was in a state like that of Karen Ann Quinlan -- who lay curled on her side in the fetal position for a decade after a drinking-and-Valium binge -- it seemed kindest to let her go.
Then when I saw the video clips of Terri's face on TV -- in marked contrast to just reading about the case -- I was appalled and incredulous that someone would want to remove her feeding tube.
She wasn't a vegetable at all, but someone brain damaged. The spark of personhood seemed obviously apparent to anyone who cared to watch.
Could anyone be serious that she was a vegetable on life support? I saw in Terri a real person, albeit disabled. Having covered the Special Olympics once as a newspaper reporter, it was obvious that Down's children had much to teach about devotion and joy, and I had nothing but admiration for parents who loved their limited children. A sophisticated ability to communicate verbally did not a person make, nor a life.
If her blood relatives possessed the Christlike, unjudgmental love for Terri even with her severe limitations, and the patience to care for her, we should be applauding their heroism.
One begins to think one is hallucinating such an interpretation of Terri's videos, given the culture of death that leads much of the country to oppose government intervention in this case, but others see her the same way. As Wesley J. Smith wrote on National Review Online:
Videotapes of Terri clearly show her responding to requests. For example, a closed-eyed Terri is asked to open her eyes by a doctor. Her eyes flutter and she does as he requests. She is asked in another video to follow a balloon with her eyes, and she does. In a heartbreaking video, Terri's mother kisses her on the cheek and Terri smiles and responds, clearly happy that her mom is with her.
Can anyone explain to me why Judge George Greer found Michael Schiavo's arguments to kill his former wife (he now has a new family) compelling? Mark Steyn, writing in the Chicago Sun-Times of March 27, 2005, seems as baffled as the rest of us:
This is not a criminal, not a murderer, not a person whose life should be in the gift of the state. So I find it repulsive, and indeed decadent, to have her continued existence framed in terms of ''plaintiffs'' and ''petitions'' and ''en banc review'' and ''de novo'' and all the other legalese. Mrs. Schiavo has been in her present condition for 15 years. Whoever she once was, this is who she is now -- and, after a decade and a half, there is no compelling reason to kill her. Any legal system with a decent respect for the status quo -- something too many American judges are increasingly disdainful of -- would recognize that her present life, in all its limitations, is now a well-established fact, and it is the most grotesque judicial overreaching for any court at this late stage to decide enough is enough. It would be one thing had a doctor decided to reach for the morphine and ''put her out of her misery'' after a week in her diminished state; after 15 years, for the courts to treat her like a Death Row killer who's exhausted her appeals is simply vile. ...Michael Schiavo is living in a common-law relationship with another woman, by whom he has fathered children. I make no judgment on that. Who of us can say how we would react in his circumstances? Maybe I'd pull my hat down over my face and slink off to the cathouse on the other side of town once a week. Maybe I'd embark on a discreet companionship with a lonely widow. But if I take on a new wife (in all but name) and make a new family, I would think it not unreasonable to forfeit any right of life or death over my previous wife.
Michael Schiavo took a vow to be faithful in sickness and in health, forsaking all others till death do them part. He's forsaken his wife and been unfaithful to her: She is, de facto, his ex-wife, yet, de jure, he appears to have the right to order her execution. This is preposterous. Suppose his current common-law partner were to fall victim to a disabling accident. Would he also be able to have her terminated? Can he exercise his spousal rights polygamously? The legal deference to Mr. Schiavo's position, to his rights overriding her parents', is at odds with reality.
Many observers find interesting, as did Peggy Noonan in "In Love with Death: the bizarre passion of the pull-the-tube people," the vehemence of proponents of starving and dehydrating Terri Schiavo.
Part of this is displaced, visceral and inexplicable loathing for the president, Republicans or conservatism in general.
Part of it is elitist views that might be expressed as "the unexamined life is not worth living," as expanded into a view that "a life constrained by severe disability is not worth living." In other words, sophisticates in particular project their own fears of being severely disabled, and no longer worthwhile to a spouse, on to a Terri Schiavo. They do not see the smile for her mother, they see only the immobile body unable to perform many of its prior functions.
They are, in the words of Joe Ford, "bigots:"
Like many others with disabilities, I believe that the American public, to one degree or another, holds that disabled people are better off dead. To put it in a simpler way, many Americans are bigots. A close examination of the facts of the Schiavo case reveals not a case of difficult decisions but a basic test of this country’s decency.Our country has learned that we cannot judge people on the basis of minority status, but for some reason we have not erased our prejudice against disability. One insidious form of this bias is to distinguish cognitively disabled persons from persons whose disabilities are “just” physical. Cognitively disabled people are shown a manifest lack of respect in daily life, as well. This has gotten so perturbing to me that when I fly, I try to wear my Harvard t-shirt so I can “pass” as a person without cognitive disability. (I have severe cerebral palsy, the result of being deprived of oxygen at birth. While some people with cerebral palsy do have cognitive disability, my articulation difference and atypical muscle tone are automatically associated with cognitive disability in the minds of some people.)
Much of the vehemence against Terri Shiavo is liberals exploiting her as a proxy for the abortion issue, as Thomas Sowell notes:
Terri Schiavo is being killed because she is inconvenient to her husband and because she is inconvenient to those who do not want the idea of the sanctity of life to be strengthened and become an impediment to abortion. Nor do they want the supremacy of judges to be challenged, when judges are the liberals' last refuge.
This explains the mainstream media's refusal to publicize Schiavo's nurses who concur with her family that she is a human presence who smiles at familiar visitors and caregivers, or who tell of her "husband's" reference to her as bitch.
One of Terri's nurses, Trudy Capone, related many conversations where Michael Schiavo admitted (I paraphrase the quote from memory) that he did not know Terri's wishes on being kept living: "I don't know what do to, we never talked about this" (source: interview with Capone on Greta Van Susteren's MSNBC show, Good Friday, 2005).
Hundreds of thousands watch this show and know the entire underpinning of Michael Schiavo's case to starve Terri is without merit. But Judge George Greer refuses to weigh such evidence, available since at least 2001 via an affidavit.
And finally, as regards unseemly glee in the undoing of this disabled woman, there is a sort of emotional retardation, an autism if you will, that ignores the spark of happiness in Terri's eyes in the videos, a tone-deafness among some (not all) men toward reading faces of those who trust others for their care. We women may be hardwired to read faces of dependents correctly and find the person within. That is the only explanation I can find for the cruelty and heartlessness on sites such as Fark.com, partly dominated by information technology types, who were nothing short of elated at the U.S. Supreme Court's rejection of Terri's appeal.
Numerous commentators have sensed the intelligentsia's squeamishness at becoming disabled, being an inconvenience to others, or "unproductive." John Leo notes:
Among bioethicists, [Leon] Kass [a moderate conservative who heads the president's committee on bioethics] says, "there is a kind of condescension toward the views of the general public [and] a very real danger that what constitutes meaningful life among the intellectual elite will be imposed on people as the only standard by which the value of human life is measured." Under pressure from bioethicists, norms have been collapsing. Fifteen years ago, as author Wesley Smith writes in his 2002 bookThe Culture of Death, legally assisted suicide was unthinkable. So was harvesting the organs of terminally ill patients, which is done today and approved by bioethicists.
Orson Scott Card describes being at a party of literati in the New Republic:
It wasn’t that many years ago when I happened to be in Raleigh at a gathering of literary folk who were quite full of their own superiority. They started talking about people who (gasp!) let years go by without reading a single book.“Why do they even bother being alive?” asked one of them. Almost everyone laughed.
They went on and on about the worthlessness of the lives of non-intellectuals. Shopping in malls. Eating at McDonald’s. Driving their gas-guzzling cars.
I did ask where they shopped, and which of them had arrived at the party by balloon. I have not been invited to such gatherings since.
It’s so easy to decide that someone else’s life is not worth living. Lacking something that we regard as essential, we cannot fathom how they get through a day.
The nattering of intellectuals about the valuelessness of the “unexamined life” might be taken as hyperbole, if it weren’t for the fact that it is precisely our intellectual elite that has decided to set itself up as champions of the right to murder people “for their own good.”
... For instance, we now live in a country where you can kill your wife, as long as she’s tragically brain-damaged, lying in a hospital bed, unable to speak.
She does open her eyes, though. And she can track objects that move across her field of vision. She isn’t in a coma.
She even has people who want to take care of her. Her parents, her siblings.
And pay no attention to the “experts” who say that these apparent signs of intelligent life aren’t real. We once had an “expert” make the same sort of declaration about our son Charlie, after a mere half hour of observation, completely discounting the experience of Charlie’s parents and other caretakers who knew perfectly well that he really communicated with us.
The expert’s assumption was that anything seen through the eyes of people who loved Charlie was to be discounted completely. Ironically, though, it is precisely the people whose attention is concentrated by love who are best equipped to judge whether communication is happening — since it is happening with them.
The people who love Terri Schiavo apparently do not include her husband, who seems awfully impatient to get rid of her.
And under our bizarre laws, he has the only vote, and her parents and brothers and sisters are completely disregarded.
What is the husband’s case for killing her?
It couldn’t possibly be because he wants to be able to marry the woman he’s living with now. After all, to accomplish that he need only divorce the brain-damaged woman in a hospital bed.
Oh, but wait. If he divorces her, then he won’t get as much of that million-dollar settlement that’s paying for her care right now. Only if she dies will he get any of that.
No, his motive is completely noble and unselfish. He wants to shut off her feeding tube because she “wouldn’t have wanted to live like this.”
Hmmmm. Convenient that she can’t speak, isn’t it?
The incredible thing — to me, at least, and yet I have to believe it, don’t I — is that he was able to find a judge who would give him the right to kill this woman.
Despite the fact that she has loved ones who are desperate to keep her alive and take responsibility for her care. Despite the fact that the husband’s motives are suspect at best. Somehow, judges in Florida keep finding a “right to kill” hidden somewhere in the law.
Well, we have a precedent for that, don’t we. When it comes to legalized killing, our judges are way ahead of our legislatures ...
Once you plunge out onto that slippery slope of allowing the killing of another human organism for no better reason than personal convenience, it’s so hard to find a handhold to let you climb back up.
The intellectual may imagine that he or she may be far more threatened by a state of minimal consciousness than the more typical person -- Schiavo was an insurance-claims clerk. But let's consider the extraordinary book 
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
After a massive stroke, former Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby wrote this book by blinking his left eye, to indicate one letter and then another, and having his blinks transcribed into a manuscript. In his book, Bauby described his imagination's rich journeys to sensual places. As one perceptive reviewer noted:
Public opinion surveys reveal an interesting contrast in modern opinions on the "right to die." Contrary to the accepted wisdom, the so-called right is favored by those who are young and healthy, but opposed by those who are old and sick. The very premise which underlies such a right is the belief that the quality of life experienced by the aged and the ill is so inadequate that they would willingly choose death instead. In fact, the evidence suggests that--despite the anecdotal horror stories with which all of us are familiar--people generally cling to life even in the face of suffering which seems unendurable to the well.
Harriet McBryde Johnson, above, a deeply impressive, wheelchair-bound woman whom I caught on TV last week, eloquently defends Congress's intervention in "Not Dead at All," noting:
In addition to the rights all people enjoy, Ms. Schiavo has a statutory right under the Americans With Disabilities Act not to be treated differently because of her disability. Obviously, Florida law would not allow a husband to kill a nondisabled wife by starvation and dehydration; killing is not ordinarily considered a private family concern or a matter of choice. It is Ms. Schiavo's disability that makes her killing different in the eyes of the Florida courts. Because the state is overtly drawing lines based on disability, it has the burden under the ADA of justifying those lines.
Pat Buchanan noted with a sorrowful, dignified "quiet outrage" on MSNBC's Scarborough Country on Friday that you would be prosecuted in this country for denying water and food to a cat. Where is the upwelling of national outrage for dehydrating a brain-damaged woman? I do challenge all the heartless ones out there overjoyed by the setback to Terri Schiavo, delighted that this may bump down the president's poll numbers, to start right now not drinking a drop of any liquid for nine days before you wish such a fate on any living being.
Desert explorer William Langwiesche described thirst as the most terrible of deaths in 
Sahara Unveiled -- on pages 149-51, he describes a Belgian family lost in the Sahara in Algeria. They drank in rough order radiator fluid, gasoline, their own urine and finally each other's blood, as thirst maddened them. Their son begged for death, and they killed him. The husband begged for death, and the wife broke his neck with a rock.
We would treat anyone this way? Condemn them to die of thirst, in a hospice where they should be made comfortable? How does Judge Greer or Michael Schiavo or his lawyer George J. Felos live with their decisions?
Jeffrey Bell and Frank Cannon in the Weekly Standard urge us not to make too much of the opinion polls that purport to show opposition to Congress's (failed) intervention in the Schiavo case:
It is no anomaly that roughly half of the Democratic congressmen who returned to Washington to vote on the pro-Terri Schiavo emergency legislation in March voted Yes instead of No. And it is no anomaly that it's impossible to find a Democratic leader acting as if he takes at face value the ABC and CBS polls that purport to show strong national approval of Michael Schiavo and the array of federal and state judges who effectively gave him their blessing.For President Bush and the social conservatives who comprise the central rampart of his base, the courts' naked assertion of judicial supremacy in deciding the fate of Terri Schiavo represents an important moment. This is because the premise of the Democratic filibuster of the president's conservative judicial nominees is that the Roe v. Wade decision must never again be called into question.
The judicial confirmation debate will now unavoidably be about whether democratic decision-making on abortion should continue to be prohibited by our courts and (effectively) by the American legal profession. From the beginning, those who believed Roe would corrupt the rule of law feared that state sanction of private killing would put all public order and all private restraint in doubt. The fate of Terri Schiavo makes clear that those fears were utterly on target.
A very active and appalled proportion of this nation is more than ever perplexed by our judiciary.
This may not show up now in the polls but expect time to bring greater and greater questioning of how Judge George Greer managed to order the starvation of a disabled woman in a nation supposedly devoted to liberty and justice. What sort of horror must a mother such as Mary Schindler endure as to have a court order deny her daughter even the comfort of ice chips on the tongue or the administration of Holy Communion?
A doctor, Steven Collins, experienced in caring for cancer patients asks these valid questions that an ethical person must consider. While I do not agree that Terri cannot communicate with those around her (a huge proportion of communication is nonverbal), let's give the doctor a hearing:
Should medical intervention (i.e. a feeding tube surgically placed through her skin into her stomach) be continued to indefinitely prolong the life of this woman, who is totally helpless and paralyzed and likely nearly blind, who cannot swallow and enjoy any food, who cannot communicate with the loved ones around her and likely cannot even understand what they have to say to her, who is incapable of rational thought, who may be in intermittent and perhaps severe pain and yet cannot get relief from this pain because she cannot communicate her distress to others, and who has been in this state for the past 15 years with no hope for recovery? What would I want for myself in this situation? What would I want for my children in this situation? What is the most decent and humane and compassionate approach to take?In the case of Terri Schiavo in my mind the above issues are the only relevant questions -- questions that unfortunately I fail to see being addressed by the politicians, the religious sector, and the media pundits and columnists who have offered their varied opinions.
In "How Liberalism Failed Terri Schiavo," Eric Cohen notes:
A true adherence to procedural liberalism -- respecting a person's clear wishes when they can be discovered, erring on the side of life when they cannot -- would have led to a much better outcome in this case. It would have led the court to preserve Terri Schiavo's life and deny Michael Schiavo's request to let her die. But as we have learned, the descent from procedural liberalism's respect for a person's wishes to ideological liberalism's lack of respect for incapacitated persons is relatively swift. Treating autonomy as an absolute makes a person's dignity turn entirely on his or her capacity to act autonomously. It leads to the view that only those with the ability to express their will possess any dignity at all--everyone else is "life unworthy of life."This is what ideological liberalism now seems to believe--whether in regard to early human embryos, or late-stage dementia patients, or fetuses with Down syndrome. And in the end, the Schiavo case is just one more act in modern liberalism's betrayal of the vulnerable people it once claimed to speak for. Instead of sympathizing with Terri Schiavo--a disabled woman, abandoned by her husband, seen by many as a burden on society--modern liberalism now sympathizes with Michael Schiavo, a healthy man seeking freedom from the burden of his disabled wife and self-fulfillment in the arms of another. And while one would think that divorce was the obvious solution, this was more than Michael Schiavo apparently could bear, since it would require a definitive act of betrayal instead of a supposed demonstration of loyalty to Terri's wishes.
We can pray for Judge Greer to see the light, or Michael Schiavo to grant his "wife" life, but this matter is now in God's hands, for Man has decided somehow that a simple feeding tube is somehow an extraordinary measure to keep this 41-year-old woman alive.
I cannot help but fear, having seen the videos and read affidavits by her sister, Suzanne Vitadamo, and attorney, Barbara Weller, that Terri wants water and sustenance and life right now, that she has tried to communicate her family this to the best of her remaining ability, and cruelness has triumphed over compassion in those black-robed gods who could temper her fate.
- posted by jbelliveau at 4:14 PM in Culture
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March 5, 2005
My favorite Amazon.com review, ever
I discovered this some years ago and still find it a treasure and a wonder of sardonic writing -- it's a review on Amazon.com of Eve Ensler's 
The Vagina Monologues.
Somehow I recalled this today and thought I would "share."
Kudos to the anonymous author who truly knows how to damn with faint praise!
***
After fainting a few times, I thoroughly was won over, October 25, 1998
Reviewer: A reader
My first reaction to this book which I selected at my local library after a messy day on the job pouring concrete was that I wanted to write a sequel and title it "the cock chronicles".
As I sat alone though in my dirty-interiored pick-up truck resting my sore body I was touched in many ways by the books sensitivity not just to womans feelings, but to humanities.
I do confess to being an occassional watcher of pornography because my attention span is sometimes thus that anything that appears before me requires my immediate involvement.
But as I am now advancing in my job, I have turned to watching home improvement videos rather than porn. It has the same hands on appeal and as I age I find it will serve me more in the future.
Now as I used to want to be a professional actor and now have transferred this wanabeism to banging nails in residential contruction, I occasionally yearn to hear my golden voice.
Enough beating around the bush: my cynicism faded away as I read story after story by women about there experiences. Certainly, I was aroused at points. I yearned for a better understanding of woman and how I could learn to be more sensitive as a man.
For me, this book is more worthwhile than joining some men's organization, be it religious or civic, that poses the idea that men getting together is for the purpose of serving woman. I love art. I love peoples honest feelings. I do like to be challenged. I admit that often I am quite obsessed sexually.
I do still cat call woman but it is because I believe that I can serve them. It is in my nature. Finally, a book comes out that puts me in my place. That is what everyman really wants: to be put in his place by a woman.
As this year winds down I can honestly say that the Vagina book was the first book that I read all year. It has wet my taste for reading again that has been dormant. I am now reading all sorts of books.
I think it is an excellent book to give as a gift. To a man or a woman, this book is appropriate. Even if the person laughs at first, that is a fine response. As the holidays approach I will tell all my colleagues on the job to get this book for their woman, girlfriend, girl you are trying to hit on, wife, sister, sister-in-law. I am now set to pen my lifetime story: the Cock Chronicles.
- posted by jbelliveau at 3:03 PM in Parodies
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