Life and Death

The more I think about it, the more I agree with Orson Scott Card about the Michael/Terri Schiavo case:

'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.'

I appreciate that most people would say, with some reasonableness on their side, that we can't possibly know the ins and outs that all those court cases involved. That we shouldn't comment from ignorance, driven mainly by our emotions. However I think that my interest has not be emotionally driven except by the curiosity (a kind of species of intellectual emotion) of seeing advocates of death saying that the moving eyes and lips and head of a clearly brain damaged woman are no evidence that she feels anything whatsoever. Perhaps there is a deeper form of logic at work there than that of traditional empirical observation, willing to bet all on the efficacy of those brain charts.

I agree with these Weekly Standard contributors that those who promoted the death of Terri Schiavo as part of the panapoly of right-to-interfere and right-to-die issues, apparently as a trial of their own strength, will be unleashing a perfect storm upon themselves. I think that the Schiavo case will be a wake-up call for many, and it certainly deserves to be on merit.

What's clear as well is that legal minds have been more concerned in the Schiavo case with the enforcement of 'due process' than with a sense of Terri Schiavo's right to life. Terri's parents (the Schindlers) do appear to have antagonised the profession by apparently ingenuously and passionately believing that to state the obvious ought to be sufficient. Unfortunately for lawyerly minds seeing and not believing is pretty much part of the reason for their profession's proud place in society.

I might just add one little point about the recent attempts by the Schindlers to claim that Terri recently uttered several syllables in answer to an invitation to indicate her will to live. To me this encapsulated the Schindler's naive approach. I'm not inclined to believe that it happened at all, frankly, but one could see in it an obvious attempt to echo the vague claims about Terri's wishes that were offered by Michael Schiavo's representatives, and accepted. The trouble is that proving double standards will not shame a court, or a judge, at all, if they already consider that you are troublemakers.

I honestly believe that savvier representations would have seen Terri's right to life upheld. That's the shame of it; not that I find the outcome unappealing, but that I find many of the steps involved to be brazenly counter-commonsensical and actually unfair.

To demonstrate that grasp of reason is not limited to the rationalists advocating Terri's death, have a look at Malkin's demolition of some unfair personal journalism. To show that I can listen to the other point of view, Donald Sensing makes as good a case as anyone (but I think he's wrong). Oh yes, and this a pretty intelligent anti-Terri case too (terrible to put it in these terms but she is dying)