No matter what: In an earlier
post/diagram, we argued that "Republicans and Christian right would - based on any possiblity of recovery,
no matter how small - prevent a guardian or
a sentient person from rejecting therapy".
We have confirmation in an
interview over at NRO. Excerpts: (emp add)
National Review Online recently had a chance to talk to Robert P. George, the McCormick professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University and a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, about the Terri Schiavo case ...
NRO: As you know, there's some question about what Terri Schiavo's wishes were or would be now. How much should turn on this question?
George: It is the wrong question. It is pointless to ask whether Terri Schiavo had somehow formed a conditional intention to have herself starved to death if eventually she found herself in a brain-damaged condition.
Even if we were to credit Michael Schiavo's account of his conversation with Terri before her injury ... it is a mistake to assume that people can make decisions in advance about whether to have themselves starved to death if they eventually find themselves disabled. That's why living wills have proven to be so often unreliable. One does not know how one will actually feel, or how one will feel about one's life and the prospect of death, or whether one will retain a desire to live despite a mental or physical disability, when one is not actually in that condition and when one is envisaging it from the perspective of more or less robust health.
Consider the case of a beautiful young woman — an actress or fashion model perhaps — who is severely burned in a fire. Prior to actually finding herself in such a condition, she might have supposed — and even said, if the subject had come up in a conversation — that she would rather be dead than live with her face grotesquely disfigured. But no one would be surprised if in the actual event she did not try to kill herself by starvation or some other means, and did not want to die.
In any event, it is clear that the only reason for Michael Schiavo's decision is that he considers Terri's quality of life to be so poor that he wants her to be dead. He claims that she would want that too, which I don't grant, but even if he's right about that, we should treat her like anyone else who wants to commit suicide. We rescue, we care. We affirm the inherent value of the life of every human being. Our governing principle should be always to care, never to kill.
That's from a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, don't forget.
ALSO: Mickey Kaus
applauds George's position ("the beginning of wisdom on the Schiavo case").
posted by Quiddity at 3/23/2005 12:38:00 AM 
