Another Word on the Schiavo Case
Posted on June 16th, 2005
by Daniel Larison |
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Laws authorizing a guardian to starve to death a ward are profoundly immoral, even as applied to those who would have wanted to die; we do not accommodate suicides. But in hundreds of cases around the country every year, such laws are enforced, and hundreds of people die like Terri Schiavo. The only extraordinary thing about the Schiavo case is that her parents have done everything in their power to prevent her death, with the result that Schiavo has received much more process and much more publicity than others to whom the same thing has happened. One commentator described the Schiavo case as the “crime of the century.” In fact it is a banal, run-of-the-mill crime of a kind that happens every day in the United States.
And for this, we cannot blame the courts. The fault lies not in our judges but in ourselves, for we have created a society in which the law allows the strong and healthy to determine that some of the weak and infirm have lives not worth living and then to kill them. ~Robert T. Miller, First Things (courtesy of Orthodoxy Today)
Nothing—not a Mickey Mouse balloon, not even a mother’s soothing voice—would have gotten a response from Terri Schiavo, the comatose Florida woman whose right-to-die case entangled the courts and mesmerized America for months. That’s according to an autopsy report released today. Any message from the world would have had to travel the neural pathway to her neocortex, where it would then have been processed and a response generated. That first step, the initial incoming route, was destroyed some 15 years ago when, with her brain deprived of oxygen, she slipped into a persistent vegetative state.
The medical examiners found no evidence of strangulation or abuse—another question raised in the legal proceedings. “They did an extremely thorough job of ruling that out,” says Karen Weidenheim, chief of neuropathology at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. And the autopsy concluded that the vision centers of her brain were dead, rendering her blind.
Her death on March 31 ended a familial, legal, and political struggle over removing her feeding tube. The autopsy showed that her brain was half the size of normal, and examiner Jon Thogmartin said at a press conference: “No amount of therapy or treatment would have regenerated the massive loss of neurons.” ~U.S. News and World Report
Initially, I had not intended to discuss the autopsy of the unfortunate Mrs. Schiavo. What the report told us spoke for itself, and the pro-existence enthusiasts, who lost all sense of perspective and proportion during the controversy earlier this year, could read the facts themselves if they were so inclined. Short of a fideism or spiritualism that mocks the understanding of the integral unity of body and soul in the Christian faith, no Christian can seriously believe that Mrs. Schiavo was meaningfully alive as a human person during the last many years. St. Gregory of Nyssa made the common-sense observation that the brain has a unique and important role in the unity of body and soul, which he deduced from the obviously deliterious consequences to human life resulting from serious brain trauma.
One cannot speak of “quality of life” or the lack of it when everything except basic respiration has ceased: one must speak of the absence of anything resembling human life. Integral union of body and soul cuts in both directions: it confirms that everything we do in the material world is spiritually significant, that human life and human nature are constituted of both physical and spiritual elements, and that human life is diminished to the extent that the bond between body and soul is weakened through injury and illness and finally severed in death. If deification in the flesh in this life is the basic perfection of the body-soul relationship in human life, the breakdown of the major organ responsible for cognition must be fairly far on the opposite side of the spectrum. Far from truly natural life in communion with God, this is simply persistence in an empty existence in which the soul cannot act through the body nor can it know peace. This is not to idolise cognition or make the brain the “location” of the soul, as some moderns are wont to do, but nonetheless to acknowledge that without cognition human physical life is almost indistinguishable from that of animals. One might persist in keeping someone’s body functioning long after reaching this point, but at that point this is not done for the sake of the injured person but for one’s own consolation.
The autopsy, which showed the extensive deterioration of Mrs. Schiavo’s brain from the lack of oxygen suffered after her initial collapse, might have provided a sober corrective to the hysteria of past months. But then I saw that our friends at First Things intended to dredge up this tragedy once again in their May issue to get a little more mileage out of this poor woman’s sad life. There are many people of goodwill who presumably believed that what was done to Mrs. Schiavo was an appalling crime. There was enough disinformation and enthusiasm during the final months of the controversy to mislead many people who might have thought differently had they had access to more of the facts, rather than relying on the innuendo and rumour that passed for much of the argument on the pro-existence side. The motivation to defend the helpless and the sick is an honourable and Christian one, but it was never more erroneously applied than in this case, where there was no chance of recovery or rehabilitation and simply a persistence in false hope. There was all the difference in the world between Mrs. Schiavo and the many other disabled or comatose people whose plight she was supposed to symbolise, and pro-life people would do well to meditate on that difference.
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3 Responses to “Another Word on the Schiavo Case”
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Dan, I appreciate your sober reflection on the subject, and particularly your theological perspective, with which I am in complete agreement. I only wish that, during the debate on the subject, more people could have understood it in these terms. Perhaps it would have helped bring to light what the controversy over Ms. Shiavo’s fate was ever really about: Politics, not life.
If there is anything good to come out of this sad event, it is, perhaps, that the efforts of the neocons were so unsubtle that Americans finally recognized their policies for what they were: posturing and power grabs. Polls showing plummeting approval rates for both Bush and the Republican Congress consistently cite that most people did not appreciate the naked ambition of Congress’ actions in interfering with this case, even when these same people were inclined to sympathy with Ms. Shiavo’s parents and the impetus behind the Republicans’ actions.
If this event contributed in any way to the neocons overplaying their hand and earning the suspicion of the American people, then perhaps there will be some redemption to be found.
Mr. Larison has one of the few sane and sober comments on this unfortunate case, and I say that not only because I agree with his position. The public debate has been a sorry spectacle, and the only side worse than the advocates of painless life and quick death have been the professional Christian activists who have misrepresented the facts and deliberately confused the moral issues at stake. I am reminded of the well-meaning opponents of drugs who popularized horror stories of students dropping acid and went blind from staring into the sun. Eventually, such lies create a backlash. But the difference between the well-meaning physician who spread that false story and the professional Christian activists is that the former was motivated only by a desire to do good rather than a plan to increase the morale of a movement from which they make their livings.
My thanks to Jeremy and Dr. Fleming for their comments. The response to the Schiavo case seems to have been nothing other than a kind of mass hysteria, and for that the modern-day demagogues (i..e, the activist leaders, radio hosts, editorialists and politicians, among others) are very much to blame. I am still drawn to the expression “bleeding heart conservatism,” to the extent that the term conservatism can even be applied to any of the people involved, to capture the sheer emotionalism that was motivating so much of the enthusiasm for Mrs. Schiavo’s case on both sides. Of course, such emotionalism does not reflect a serious political persuasion or temperament (except perhaps an unbalanced, passionate one), so “bleeding-heart conservatism” might not be the best choice.
As an Orthodox Christian, I found it most unfortunate that most public Orthodox commentators and even some of our bishops felt compelled to side, almost reflexively, with the more enthusiastic activists in this matter. As the citation from St. Gregory was meant to show, I respectfully submit that they seem to have misinterpreted the matter. I fear that this conflation of Mrs. Schiavo’s case with an otherwise admirable and consistent Orthodox defense of the sanctity of life reflected a surprising disconnection from the Church’s patristic inheritance on the relationship between body and soul. It also seemed to show a lack of appreciation for the extent to which most Fathers viewed the rationality of our rational souls as, if not the sole mark of being made in the image of God, a decisive element in distinguishing human life and defining human nature. Someone deprived of the basic physical means to exercise that rationality through cognition is someone deprived of a significant part of his humanity. I would hope that is common sense, and that it is not an unreasonable statement.
David Hart, the reliable Orthodox collaborator with WSJ and First Things, exemplified this confusion. Thus he said of Mrs. Schiavo two months ago: “Christians who understand their faith are obliged to believe that she was, to the last, a living soul. It is true that, in some real sense, it was her soul that those who loved her could no longer reach, but it was also her soul that they touched with their hands and spoke to and grieved over and adored.” Going from the rather thoughtless dualism he was criticising at the start of his article, he wound up at a rather weird near-monism (surely he knows that the soul is intangible and incorporeal, even as it is united the body?). Integrated unity of body and soul became, as it often can for Orthodox theologians, a catchphrase that allows the theologian to avoid taking seriously the consequences and logic of the idea being invoked. The approach to just war theory at First Things is very similar–the existence of the concept becomes a sort of permission slip for justifying any distortion of it, provided that perfunctory attention is paid to the original concept. If it can be used to caricature and mock one’s opponents, I suppose it is that much more attractive to that brand of theologian.
I had one last point, in response to Jeremy’s comment. As much as I would like to lay all evils at the feet of the neocons (and we can lay quite a few there), this episode was the product of a slightly different set of people on one side, undoubtedly allied politically with the neocons in many ways but different in their religion and religious politics, who were fighting against the generally secularist forces, including many prominent neocons, who rallied against them. (This is a somewhat crude description, I admit, but bear with me.) Outside of the First Things neocon circle, the neocon pundits themselves took a very predictably secularist, materialist view of the matter, and their general fear and loathing of genuine religion kept them far away from any sort of enthusiasm in this case. Some of them happened to disagree with intervening in the case, not because they were taking a serious, thoughtful view of the matter or cared about the law, but because they have no interest in actually empowering or supporting anything that even resembles, however confusedly, a social conservative agenda. The loyally Republican evangelicals make for useful cannon fodder for their wars and their political campaigns, but there is almost no group the neocons loathe more than those very evangelicals.