Terri Schiavo and the
Commentary by
Tom McKnight
This fall the image of Terri Schiavo, a young woman with severe brain damage unable to care for herself, was thrust into our living rooms on the evening news. Life or death in the balance…a husband who wanted her
| dead…her
family fighting to keep her alive through a feeding tube. The
drama was gripping. Like participants in an ancient Roman Coliseum
contest we are being asked, along with the local This dilemma displayed in the |
 Terri Schiavo |
Meet Peter Singer, professor of Bio-ethics
at
As you can imagine, this practical ethic has many terrifying
ramifications. Singer argues that
parents should have a right to terminate the life of their infant after birth
if they feel the child’s life will involve too much suffering. You see, acts like abortion or infanticide
are not wrong in and of themselves for Mr. Singer. It is only the consequences of an act that
determine its moral relevance. So, if
killing a newborn with Down’s Syndrome will make room in the family budget for
a potentially healthy child then the
parents have a right, if not a responsibility, to kill the child so as to
decrease suffering and increase potential pleasure, i.e., raising a healthy
child.
Singer represents a growing breed of
unashamed, secular bio-ethicists that fill prestigious teaching positions at
major universities. Pushing aside a
Judeo-Christian view of human dignity, they arrogantly give a thumbs down to the lives of the weak and
severely handicapped like Terri Schiavo.
To Mr. Singer and his colleagues I would
like to give at least three reasons why the weakest members of the human
community have value and should live.
1. The
outcome or consequence of an act is a faulty foundation for determining right
from wrong. Ethicists like
Singer argue that the outcome of the act determines its moral justification. For them, reducing suffering or increasing
pleasure are adequate reasons to end the life of handicapped newborns or
unwanted pre-borns. Likewise, killing Terri
is justified since it ends her suffering
and frees up resources to assist others that might live a better life. Let’s play out
this reasoning to its logical conclusion.
With this moral paradigm the case could be made for killing a toddler in
a Roman Coliseum since the happiness of 50,000 sadists cheering in the crowd
outnumber the suffering of just one small child. This sounds absurd, because as Christians we
know morality is not based on outcomes. Certain
acts like rape, incest and slavery are wrong because they are wrong in and of
themselves regardless of what pleasure some people might get from them!
2. Caring
for the weakest and smallest members of the human community assures equality
for all of us. In Mr. Singer’s
world there are some lives worth living and some lives not worth living based upon
their functional capacity which can be graphed on a bell curve of values and
human rights. You don’t have any worth
or rights when you are born, then as you increase in function, you gain greater
rights and value. Then, near the end of
life as your functions decrease, you lose more of your value and rights. This approach presents serious human rights consequences. For example, assuming the unborn or an infant
lacks self-consciousness and the ability to reason, then it only makes sense (In
Singer’s world) that people with greater reasoning powers and
self-consciousness should have more rights.
This
type of discrimination is exactly what we have observed throughout human
history: groups of people seeking to dehumanize others based on size, race, or
level of development. It may be the unborn,
severely handicapped and elderly today, but tomorrow it may be the poor and
uneducated that the powerful pronounce as unfit
to live.
3. Terri Schiavo has human rights not because
of what she can do or not do, but because of what she is, a human being created
in the image of God. Mr. Singer
argues that it is only our archaic belief in God and the Bible that justifies our doctrine in human superiority to animals. But the burden is on him to justify his
appeal for fundamental animal rights equal to humans. He has no justification, because if God
doesn’t exist there is no basis for any rights, human or animal. After all, where would those rights come
from?
As
Christians we understand, as did the framers of our Constitution, that human
rights are grounded in nature and
nature’s God. Cut off from this
foundation, we are left to the political will of the powerful to prove who has
rights and who does not. Recent human
history with its gas chambers, gulags, lynch mobs and abortion mills, illustrates
that it is always the weakest among us who suffer when they are cut off from their
God given rights.
Unfortunately the days ahead appear dark
for the unborn, elderly and the severely handicapped. As Christians we must give a defense of the
hope within us, especially in matters of truth, life and human dignity. If the Church is not equipped and committed
to stand up for the most vulnerable among us, the world is a much less safer
place…for everyone.
Tom McKnight is the
Director of