Today, March 31, 2006, marks the one year anniversary of Terri Schiavo's death by starvation. All too quickly, Terri's name and cause disappeared from the national awareness as our attention-deficit culture moved on to other issues and other concerns.
Just in time for the anniversary of her death, publishers have released books written by Terri's former husband, Michael Schiavo, and her parents--each offering competing visions of Terri's life and the meaning of Terri's death. Given the symbolic nature of this sad anniversary, another flurry of news stories, cable news programs, and media commentaries are likely to appear. But, has America learned anything about the sanctity of human life over the past twelve months?
There are signs that Americans may actually be resigning themselves to the inevitability of euthanasia and the Culture of Death. In the aftermath of Terri Schiavo's death, a wave of commentary appeared, offering the suggestion that what Americans should have learned from the controversy was that personal autonomy should triumph over all other moral concerns and priorities. Beyond this, others have been quick to point accusing fingers at political figures, including George W. Bush, who attempted to intervene on behalf of Terri's life.
All this suggests that most people address this controversy with considerable confusion. When it comes to matters of life and death, we moderns face quandaries and questions unimaginable in previous generations. Regrettably, we are now attempting to answer those questions while the very worldview that would offer hope and moral assistance is being undermined and rejected.
Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, argues that "a crucial line divides those who affirm and those who deny that the life of each human being possesses inherent and equal worth and dignity, irrespective not only of race, ethnicity, age, and sex (as everyone agrees), but stage of development, mental or physical infirmity, and condition of dependency."
Professor George addressed these issues as a panelist at an event sponsored by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, the Federalist Society, and the Constitution Project. An edited form of his comments is published as "Terminal Logic," in the March 2006 edition of Touchstone.
As George rightly insists, those who attempt to distinguish between "mere biological human life" and a "person," are on the wrong side of this divide. Most often, those who make this distinction are attempting to suggest that persons possess rights while those who are merely forms of "biological human life" do not.
Professor George's clarification of these issues is urgently important and serves as a basic corrective to so much of the nonsense and confusion that characterizes the contemporary debate over human personhood, euthanasia, and related questions. If human beings are divided between those who are presumably persons and those who are not, this raises the whole question of how we are to understand "pre-personal" and "post-personal" human lives.
As Professor George explains, those who insist on the distinction between biological life and persons will "insist the question is not, When does the life of human being begin or end?, but, When does a human being qualify or cease to qualify as a person, and therefore a creature with a serious right to life? Those they regard as non-persons do not possess such a right, though killing them may be wrong for some reason other than that killing them denies the inherent dignity of persons."
Every moral argument is based upon some preconditions and presuppositions. The argument that human beings are to be divided between those who are merely biologically alive and those who possess sufficient qualities to be considered as persons is based upon a worldview that privileges human autonomy over other moral goods. As Professor George explains, "The right of autonomy immunizes individual choice in matters having to do with how one leads one's own life against interference by others, including the state, especially when the choices do not directly damage the interests or violate the rights of others."
