Attachment to the Culture of Life
Terri Schiaro’s husband insisted that she wanted to die; Terri’s parents fought a rearguard action through the courts over many years, to have her artificially fed despite her vegetative state. Last week, two weeks after her feeding tube had been removed by doctors, and while her parents were still engaged in court battles, Terri died. The question of how long people should be kept alive when according to medical opinion there is no hope of recovery became a focus in the news.
Terri’s parents are Roman Catholics and on the day of her death a priest appeared on American TV chastising her husband for a lack of compassion and Christian responsibility. Two weeks ago in my comment on abortion as an election issue, I said that many of the pro-life people I encounter are interested only in preserving the life of the foetus and do not campaign on the ending of life in other circumstances, particularly war. So is it perhaps a good sign that this priest appeared on TV campaigning against the ending of Terri’s life?
It is the question of what constitutes a natural death which is the problem here. Ten years’ ago my mother, who was in her eighties, suffering from advancing dementia and in a private nursing home, suffered a major stroke. This was not the first stroke she had undergone, but it was the most serious and although I flew out from the United Kingdom to New Zealand to be with her, by the time I got there she had slipped into a deep coma. Her doctors wanted to artificially feed her and also recommended she be shifted away from her home town to a hospital where she could receive physiotherapy. As a family we decided that she should remain where she was, given liquids, and allowed to die naturally and peacefully. Death came some days later, and the doctor put on her death certificate as the cause of death, not ‘stroke’ but ‘extreme dehydration’. I interpreted that to mean that we her family were somehow responsible for my mother’s death by not allowing her to be artificially fed, or in her comatose state, to be subjected to physiotherapy.
So I understand many of the issues Terri’s family were facing and particularly whether to allow nature to take its course, or whether to artificially or technologically prolong life.
There are thousands of similar cases every year. But the Terri Schiaro case received more publicity than most when President Bush intervened and had Congress pass special provision to have her case reviewed. On BBC television the day Terri died there was a news item which reported, “President George W Bush, who offered his sympathies to her parents, said he was attached to a ‘culture of life’”. I imagine he would say that this attachment springs from his embrace of a particular form of born- again and conservative Christian discipleship.
I would like to know more about the President’s attachment to the culture of life. Like many pro-lifers, he excludes from this culture a great many instances, including all those prisoners who were executed in Texas while he was Governor of that State, all the women and children who died in Iraq victims of ‘collateral damage’, and those dying daily in other parts of the world either as a result of his aggressive foreign policy, or from the endemic poverty which is a by-product of American isolationism, trade protectionism and refusal to accept the ecological provisions of the Kyoto agreement. When we have a single human being like Terri in the frame the issue of who accepts responsibility appears more clear-cut. But when we put a mass of people into the frame, the question of who is responsible is obfuscated.
So does the President bear any responsibility for the 152 executions while he was Governor of Texas? Can we hold him to any degree responsible for the 10,000 gun deaths in the USA every year? Or the 27 children who die every day of poverty in the USA because the President in his budget slashed support for child welfare programmes? Does his refusal to support a decrease in the amount of toxic arsenic allowed in drinking water, or his slashing of funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, both ostensibly a result of his support for the large oil companies, make him responsible for deaths incurred by those actions? And on the global scale, does the President’s refusal to see the USA reduce toxic emissions implicate him in the deaths of more than 160,000 per year from global warming? Does his declaration of war on Iraq render him accountable for the 30,000 Iraqi soldiers who died there and the estimated 100,000 civilians? The latter figure is disputed because the USA does not take civilian body counts. Do we hold him accountable for these deaths, or excuse him on the grounds that this is how it is in the world of pragmatic politics?
As I write this it has been announced from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II is dying. Although I profoundly disagree with aspects of his theology and politics as well as with his authoritarianism, here is a man who did consistently advocate a culture of life and always spoke out for human dignity and against violence and war. He made it clear to Tony Blair and probably to President Bush also, that to go to war against Iraq would be a crime against humanity. And if what we are told is true, the Pope has not sought to have his life prolonged, but has serenely accepted the approach of death and for the first time in Papal history has demanded that his vulnerability and suffering be exposed to the world’s media. Compared with this man, President Bush’s claim to be attached to the culture of life is an affront to humanity.
Terri’s parents are Roman Catholics and on the day of her death a priest appeared on American TV chastising her husband for a lack of compassion and Christian responsibility. Two weeks ago in my comment on abortion as an election issue, I said that many of the pro-life people I encounter are interested only in preserving the life of the foetus and do not campaign on the ending of life in other circumstances, particularly war. So is it perhaps a good sign that this priest appeared on TV campaigning against the ending of Terri’s life?
It is the question of what constitutes a natural death which is the problem here. Ten years’ ago my mother, who was in her eighties, suffering from advancing dementia and in a private nursing home, suffered a major stroke. This was not the first stroke she had undergone, but it was the most serious and although I flew out from the United Kingdom to New Zealand to be with her, by the time I got there she had slipped into a deep coma. Her doctors wanted to artificially feed her and also recommended she be shifted away from her home town to a hospital where she could receive physiotherapy. As a family we decided that she should remain where she was, given liquids, and allowed to die naturally and peacefully. Death came some days later, and the doctor put on her death certificate as the cause of death, not ‘stroke’ but ‘extreme dehydration’. I interpreted that to mean that we her family were somehow responsible for my mother’s death by not allowing her to be artificially fed, or in her comatose state, to be subjected to physiotherapy.
So I understand many of the issues Terri’s family were facing and particularly whether to allow nature to take its course, or whether to artificially or technologically prolong life.
There are thousands of similar cases every year. But the Terri Schiaro case received more publicity than most when President Bush intervened and had Congress pass special provision to have her case reviewed. On BBC television the day Terri died there was a news item which reported, “President George W Bush, who offered his sympathies to her parents, said he was attached to a ‘culture of life’”. I imagine he would say that this attachment springs from his embrace of a particular form of born- again and conservative Christian discipleship.
I would like to know more about the President’s attachment to the culture of life. Like many pro-lifers, he excludes from this culture a great many instances, including all those prisoners who were executed in Texas while he was Governor of that State, all the women and children who died in Iraq victims of ‘collateral damage’, and those dying daily in other parts of the world either as a result of his aggressive foreign policy, or from the endemic poverty which is a by-product of American isolationism, trade protectionism and refusal to accept the ecological provisions of the Kyoto agreement. When we have a single human being like Terri in the frame the issue of who accepts responsibility appears more clear-cut. But when we put a mass of people into the frame, the question of who is responsible is obfuscated.
So does the President bear any responsibility for the 152 executions while he was Governor of Texas? Can we hold him to any degree responsible for the 10,000 gun deaths in the USA every year? Or the 27 children who die every day of poverty in the USA because the President in his budget slashed support for child welfare programmes? Does his refusal to support a decrease in the amount of toxic arsenic allowed in drinking water, or his slashing of funding to the Environmental Protection Agency, both ostensibly a result of his support for the large oil companies, make him responsible for deaths incurred by those actions? And on the global scale, does the President’s refusal to see the USA reduce toxic emissions implicate him in the deaths of more than 160,000 per year from global warming? Does his declaration of war on Iraq render him accountable for the 30,000 Iraqi soldiers who died there and the estimated 100,000 civilians? The latter figure is disputed because the USA does not take civilian body counts. Do we hold him accountable for these deaths, or excuse him on the grounds that this is how it is in the world of pragmatic politics?
As I write this it has been announced from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II is dying. Although I profoundly disagree with aspects of his theology and politics as well as with his authoritarianism, here is a man who did consistently advocate a culture of life and always spoke out for human dignity and against violence and war. He made it clear to Tony Blair and probably to President Bush also, that to go to war against Iraq would be a crime against humanity. And if what we are told is true, the Pope has not sought to have his life prolonged, but has serenely accepted the approach of death and for the first time in Papal history has demanded that his vulnerability and suffering be exposed to the world’s media. Compared with this man, President Bush’s claim to be attached to the culture of life is an affront to humanity.
posted by MichaelElliott @ 2:13 AM
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