UPON THE EXECUTION OF
TERRI SCHIAVO
- LONG VERSION
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By now Terri Schiavo’s experience should have launched a
national debate about how to dispose of nuisance citizens
in a manner that is consistent, discreet, legal, sanitary,
and (most importantly) humane. While she is merely the
latest of thousands of people in the U.S.A. who have been
dispatched when their guardians have grown weary or have
given up hope, she has generated enough media attention
that no thinking person can be unaware of the debacle.
WHY DEBATE IT?
We need to engage in this debate without submitting to the
emotion of the zealots forever commanding media attention
over abortion, who, for years, have shouted from the same
opposing ramparts and have prevented rational dialog. Many
of the same zealots have tried to hijack the Schiavo
situation. Anyone with megaphones needs to be ignored by
those who want to resolve the matter.
We need to have this debate among ourselves, as Americans,
and we need to leave the rest of the world out of it. Many
other countries have their own solutions. If we were fully
aware how inconvenient citizens are disposed of in other
countries from Scandinavia to Southeast Asia, it would be
sobering to everyone on both extremes on the Schiavo issue.
We might, however, study other countries’ solutions and
find some guidance there, guidance both for how to select
individuals to be dispatched and what methods are most
efficient.
We need to make this a national debate not subject to
states’ rights. Rather, we need to define that which makes
us citizens of the U.S.A.; clearly we understand that one
is a citizen who has been born here or naturalized and who
has not renounced citizenship. We even confer citizenship
posthumously. What about citizens who are still breathing?
We need to decide when a breathing corpse, as Terri Schiavo
was clearly perceived by Judge Greer, ceases to hold the
rights of citizenship.
The definition of “dead” used to be a lot simpler in
centuries past, but now we seem uncertain whether a “viable
fetus” is alive, whether a body on “life support” is alive,
and whether a person who is “brain dead” is alive. Terri
Schiavo was deemed dead enough in one respect that a court
ordered her body deprived of food and water so that it
would have the good sense to go with the already dead part.
We need the national debate to define “dead” once and for
all. And concomitantly it can encompass the definition of
“not-yet-alive.” We permit fetuses with beating hearts to
be declared not alive yet, so maybe that could be
instructive at the other end of... of a lifetime. (Heart
beating but not yet alive: heart still beating but already
dead.) We need one definition nationally, because, once
again, there cannot be fifty definitions of a U.S. citizen.
We need to debate this definition outside the courts.
Courts settle disputes according to laws already on the
books and decide the constitutionality of such laws. There
is nothing in a national debate for the courts to get
involved in as long as there is not yet a national
consensus and a national law on what “dead” means. Judge
George Greer, the unwitting villain in the Terri Schiavo
case, took it upon himself to declare her legally dead. But
he was grasping at a definition that did not yet exist in
our laws.
We need to disregard what will surely be a shrill attempt
by lawyers to lead the debate. Again, it concerns what is
not yet law, and what is already law must be set aside.
Legal precedent does not inform us here. “Not-yet-alive”
and “dead” are concepts found in our national soul, not in
the Internal Revenue Code. Lawyers should be welcome in any
national debate not as experts on irrelevant law but as
individuals who may or may not have personal experience
that informs each one’s position.
We need to reach one accord and then tell Congress what
we’ve decided. Congress then needs to render our decision
in the form of a simple, unequivocal law. “This (insert
results of debate here) is what defines life. Anything not
fitting this definition is not life. Dispose of corpses
appropriately.” And, incidentally, that which defines
not-life for humans ought also to apply to beached
porpoises, comatose rhesus monkeys, laboratory rats, and
the like.
Indeed, a constitutional amendment may be the proper
result. We cannot leave it to different courts with 50
separate sets of state laws to decide upon different ways
to execute nuisance citizens.
This debate needs to be held by ordinary citizens and the
rational organizations that represent many groups of
citizens. It is not a debate that can be resolved in
Congress, because nothing decided in Congress has anything
to do with finding a real solution, much less dealing with
anything but contrived problems. Congress is ever obsessed
with finding a compromise, between opposing sets of values,
that both sides can agree wreaks the least political damage
to the two parties that control the government. Compromise
in Congress is not about agreeing on fixing something;
compromise is about appearing to fix something and getting
at least part of the credit. When the fix doesn’t work,
each side can say it wasn’t their fault because their
entire agenda wasn’t incorporated in toto into the
“solution.”
We need to have this debate because, through our collective
compassion, we have preserved populations of humans in our
midst who cannot be relied upon to take responsibility for
themselves: pathological criminals, the seriously mentally
ill, those with serious physical or mobility limitations,
the seriously mentally retarded, the frail and demented
elderly, and of course, those in a rapidly-deteriorating
state or a persistent vegetative state, which may have
arisen out of anything from birth defects to terminal
deterioration to self-inflicted loss of function or
consciousness. Terri Schiavo reached her persistent
vegetative state by initially depriving herself of
nutrition necessary to sustain consciousness. Others
inflict permanent incapacity upon themselves by such means
as over-consumption of substances that they know will
destroy them, by submitting themselves to absurd risks, and
by overtly attempting, and failing, to kill themselves.
WHO GETS TO TALK?
In order to have a rational national debate, we need to
reach a consensus on who represents some of us. I prefer to
speak for myself, but others are not confident doing so. So
I'm on my soap box and you can get onto yours. Or you can
get behind someone who thinks like you do.
There is a vanguard of citizen groups that vigorously
oppose the death penalty under all circumstances. Of all
citizen movements, this one, to my observation, generates
perhaps the most universal respect for its agenda. We
should consider including these people as rational
participants in the debate. There is another vanguard that
advocates permitting the terminally ill the option of
assisted suicide. This too is, for the most part, a
rational and compassionate group of citizens and we should
let them participate. We should let the politicians
participate who have a personal perspective to contribute.
Otherwise, they are our servants and should sit it out
until they are instructed to act. Even those of us who are
“members” of passionate organizations must agree to set
aside our most ardent passions and tell our too-vocal
organizational leaders to put a cork in it.
A debate needs moderators. A national debate needs someone
to do this who can command some media attention, some
financial backing, and most importantly, the respect of a
significant majority of us. When two former Presidents
appeared together to appeal for voluntary contributions
from Americans for victims of the 26 December 2004 tsunami,
they formed such a team. They are not necessarily the ones
to manage a national debate, but they suggest one sort of
possibility. Twenty years ago another group of influential
people came together for one brief session and recorded "We
Are the World." The effect was fleeting but pervasive.
Americans from two to 102 were singing it. People like
those who made that song are acting responsibly when they
allow themselves to be persuaded to use their enormous
influence in an unusual but benevolent way.
I'm merely squeaking like a cricket under the porch. I
can't bring the media to my door to listen to this idea. I
can hope only that someone with that kind of power pauses
to listen to me chirp for a moment, and understands.
A debate, though, involves a clash of opinions. It differs
greatly, too, from the din of opposing zealots. Zealots try
to shout each other down and rely not upon thoughtful
argument but upon insult and rage. In a debate, the
opposing sides at least suspect that the other side has a
point that could be respected. They listen to one another.
And they submit their best arguments to a panel or a
populace. When the populace decides, the debaters accept
the result.
WHAT DO I THINK?
And so, as I advocate for a national debate, I am offering
opinions along the way in the hope of stimulating support
or opposition, but opposition that attempts to persuade me,
not destroy me.
For my own part, I certainly have an opinion. I also have a
personal perspective. And I have an emotional response to
the Terri Schiavo incident as well, so I’ll get that out
and be done with it: I struggle with a court’s decision
that Terri Schiavo didn’t feel her starvation and thirst.
We assume that a hanged criminal doesn’t feel the snap when
his neck breaks. But we don’t kill people that way any
more. In the judge’s opinion, she wouldn’t feel it because
she was already legally dead. Since his was a legal opinion
not subject to direct knowledge of what she could feel, it
is no more valid than my opinion, legally held, that any
judge who could reach that conclusion wouldn’t feel it if a
broomstick were rammed up his rectum and then mounted on a
marble column on the front of his courthouse. You had a
tough case put before you, Judge Greer. But I think a
brilliant judge could have alerted the legislature in a
different way to tell them that there is a law on the books
that stinks and needs to be rectified. It didn’t require a
human sacrifice. There. Now I don’t need to say it again.
I also have a global, (in the sense of wider), more
comprehensive, perspective. But first my personal
perspective: For fifteen years I too have lived with
someone who has survived all that time only because of a
feeding tube. (We never thought of it as “life support”
though.) He doesn't walk or speak. He follows a balloon
with his eyes when it is passed before him. He is diapered
24 hours a day and must be bathed and wheeled about. We,
his family, believe that he takes pleasure in things, and
we can tell when he is uncomfortable, but when he hurts he
can't show us where, or when he is frightened, why. Maybe
we are deluded to think that he communicates in his own
way. Maybe his quality of life is crap too. On paper he
would appear to a judge to be a lot like Terri Schiavo.
Certainly he is a financial burden on society, on Medicaid
and the medical insurance, and on his family. Maybe it's
time to stop feeding him, too. Who wants to sit there and
keep vigil while my son starves to death?
On a wider perspective, I learned a little about Dr. Albert
Schweitzer when I was a youth. His influence on me is borne
in the term he coined: “reverence for life.” To the extent
that that concept affects us, we struggle to understand the
killing that is necessary so that we might eat and the
killing that others force us into so that we might defend
ourselves. But necessary killing does not justify
unnecessary killing. To this day, I still release spiders
outside that I have caught in the house, rather than
killing them.
Perhaps those same words, which describe the principle Dr.
Schweitzer attempted to elucidate in his Philosophy of
Civilization, published in 1923, became the basis for our
culture’s turn toward greater compassion for all people.
Perhaps, though, that turn had already begun to take place
and Dr. Schweitzer merely uttered what was already
understood.
WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OURSELVES?
Thus, years before I had heard of Terri Schiavo, I had
begun to contemplate the inevitable consequence of
America’s scramble to assist all people, in whatever manner
of decay and incapacity, to hold onto life at any cost –
cost in money and cost in effort. In the first place,
assisting children with genetic mental and physical
challenges to reach adulthood – children who until a
hundred years ago or less would have died sooner (and still
do, of course, in most of the rest of the world) – helps
assure that their genetic material will be passed on. As
more and more medical solutions are made available, more
and more children or their guardians assert a right to
those solutions. I participate in that process myself on
behalf of my son.
With medicines and machines we already preserve the
elderly, including the hopelessly demented elderly, beyond
their ability to sustain themselves, and at extraordinary
cost and extraordinary emotional drain. We wage costly
battles against dread diseases on a national and
international scale, fighting malaria and polio, smallpox
and influenza. These largely indiscriminate, periodic,
shotgun-approach campaigns affect whomever they can and
leave others at times unprotected. But we also wage costly
individualized battles against such dread diseases as
cancer, on the premise that every American has the right to
muster whatever resources one can on the off-chance of
becoming one more survivor.
When people who are predisposed to develop such a disease,
and who are young and strong enough to recover, do survive,
they often reproduce, increasing the odds that there will
be more people genetically predisposed to the same disease
in the future. When someone is severely injured in an
accident or loses significant function due to a stroke,
just two more examples out of many, we don’t just let them
go. We encourage them to try electric scooters at public
expense (Medicare), prostheses, and rehabilitation of
indefinite duration.
We build dialysis centers and clinics to rehabilitate
addicts who would otherwise die in oblivion and who are at
increased likelihood to become candidates for long-term
care later anyway. We agonize over the homeless and try to
steer them toward wellness and recovery at public expense,
and largely public waste, considering their recidivism.
Nowadays we give no thought to the marriage of a man and a
woman who each endure severe myopia (of the visual kind),
people who in past centuries may have been ridiculed and
tortured for their clumsiness or devoured for their
blindness before the opportunity occurred to marry and
reproduce. As innocuous as it seems, this too is an example
of our rush to assure the physical weakening of our
population. And so it goes with people who have chronic
asthma, cystic fibrosis, diabetes, a predisposition to
addictive behavior, hemophilia, and the list is endless. It
is our national will to assure us each and every one the
fighting chance we never before would have had... to weaken
the gene pool.
We have declared insane asylums inhumane, even though they
once helped keep our streets safer and to some extent
inhibited procreation. We have moved their populations into
the communities to be integrated as much as possible with
regular folks. That's good! They have rights. They aren't
dead yet either!
Nobody wants to volunteer to forego available medical
treatment that will help them fight their way back from a
disease or injury. Nobody wants to abandon their physically
or mentally weak children or grandparents to the life they
would lead if they had to be dependent completely on their
own responsibility and faculties.
We all want assistance in all of these circumstances. Most
of those who don’t have insurance have some claim to public
funds for acute or critical care. Other than the
somewhat-meaningless lifetime maximums in health insurance
policies, there are no limits to what someone can seek for
treatment. Seek it, schedule it, and ask for donations to
help pay the bills afterward. Declare bankruptcy if you
must. But our attitude is that we don’t have to sit home
and die as our ancestors did when they knew it was serious.
And there are certainly no statutory limits to the care one
may seek.
We are becoming a nation almost overrun with people who
are, if not outright nuisances to the rest of us because of
their dependency, at least greatly inconvenient to have
around. We must discuss whether this is the way we want to
go on. Unless we do something, the percentage of nuisance
people in the population will only increase. Are we okay
with this?
ISN'T THERE AT LEAST SOMEWHERE WE CAN START?
Terri Schiavo’s example at least begs the debate on whether
we can’t get rid of a few – perhaps quite a few – people
who have no awareness, no hope of developing any awareness,
and presumably have no quality of life. (If we don't debate
it and agree, then we've already assented to let the judges
decide quality of life for us based on "law.")
It almost leaves moot the debate on what to do with people
who are plainly and permanently unconscious. At this point,
consider the distinction between awareness and
consciousness. Terri Schiavo was conscious and had a
relatively normal wake-sleep cycle. But she was arguably
not aware. She apparently processed nothing that her senses
took in. At best, she had reflexive responses to certain
stimuli. So say certain "experts," anyway.
Unlike her, my son, despite the superficial similarities,
is aware. He is in an aggressive school program where he
has learned to communicate through a picture-exchange
system. He follows precise verbal instructions to match,
separate, and otherwise manipulate objects. He soothes
himself by playing sometimes sweet, sometimes raucous
“tunes” on the piano. He points when asked to “pick the one
you want.” If he is sitting on the floor before the
television and we cajole him to turn it on, he will scoot
to it and press buttons until it comes on. He has a couple
of hand signs which he invented and uses to communicate.
Someone who is conscious, then, may or may not be aware.
But someone who is aware is, almost by definition, also
conscious. (I had to say "almost" because I've read Dalton
Trumbo’s poignant novel, Johnny Got His Gun. But let’s not
go there.)
If you haven’t seen them, there are institutions in every
state where children, born in a persistent vegetative state
– (You mean New Jersey, the Garden State?) – are cared for
who can’t be cared for in their own homes and for whom
there is a paucity of foster homes. I’m familiar with such
an institution and, as closely as discretion allowed, have
spent considerable time observing the
conscious-but-not-aware, immobile children that mostly
populate the place.
If it’s cruel to say it and nobody else wants to, then I
will be the first: These children are an inconvenience.
Many of them I’ve seen have no awareness, no hope of
developing any awareness, and presumably no quality of
life. Many have been abandoned by their birth parents.
Under the criteria used to kill off Terri Schiavo, these
children are indistinguishable from her, in other words,
legally dead already, under Florida law anyway. They are,
nevertheless, U.S. citizens and, without a clear expression
of national will codified into law, judges in different
states have the option to order them executed under a
mish-mash of indistinct state laws. (I use the term
“execute” rationally and according to its dictionary
definition: to “put to death according to law.” But then, I
see my error: How could Terri Schiavo be put to death when,
although her heart continued to beat on its own and she
breathed without assistance, she was already legally dead.
You cannot kill again that which has already died... You
see, I can appreciate both sides of the debate!)
WHY IS THIS SO IMPORTANT?
A nation with a growing population of nuisance individuals
needs to decide what to do with them. Why? Because it costs
a lot to maintain them and they are consuming valuable time
and resources that could be applied to the living? Some day
that will be the incentive, but not yet. Because they are
weakening the gene pool? That’s really only a mild
side-effect involving a few individuals at this point.
We need to decide what to do with them because
if we don’t reach one accord, we must realize
that some day each of us may
become not a national inconvenience but a
personal inconvenience to the ones we most
depend upon to look out for our interest. Any
of us may, then, be deemed unable to feel or comprehend and
may then be sentenced to death by starvation or some such
method. Why would we want to subject our loved ones to the
agonizing decision that Michael Schiavo had to come to and
the rest of the family to a feud with no winner?
We could choose, after rational, national debate,
to continue to be compassionate toward the partly dead
among us, so that those who, like Michael Schiavo, have
simply gone on as long as they can and need to be relieved
will have a recourse other than a court order of execution.
Those who give up caring for the partly dead need to be
forgiven for giving up but also need to understand that
there should be no financial gain or loss in doing so. They
need the liberty to turn guardianship and custody over to
the state, not so that the state can put their vegetable to
death, but so that the state can then contract for further
care if not equipped to maintain nuisance people in
state-run semi-incarceration or warehouses. A necessary
adjunct to this decision will be to make possible a network
of foster homes where people who have been turned over to
the state can be cared for with the compassion that others
can no longer muster.
Or we could create a national rating system and
simply execute people who don’t score above, say, a ‘two’,
or some logical but fixed threshold. If we do create a
national rating system that provides for the execution of
people who don’t meet the threshold, Terri Schiavo being a
good example, those of us with loved ones in declining
health who can’t speak for themselves – my son for instance
– must accept the national will and step aside when that
threshold is passed on one’s way to total death. We must
let the last heartbeat be assigned by the state, but
according to a national law or constitutional amendment
that leaves little doubt what the criteria are.
HOW CAN I INTERCEDE ON MY OWN BEHALF?
However such a debate might turn out, let us nevertheless
accept the wishes of each individual who, while coherent,
has expressed a desire to avoid “heroic measures” and “life
support” when in a coma, persistent vegetative, or even
quadriplegic completely-dependent state. That is, if the
national will dictates that we must sustain what life
remains by whatever means are possible – pretty much as
things are now despite the winds of change heralded by our
collective apathy over Terri Schiavo – and if the
individual says: “When I’m clearly on my way out, let me
go,” then the debate should let the perspective of that
individual be respected.
If instead the national will dictates that a scorecard will
determine when to execute someone, but that someone, while
aware and reasonably believing that such an end is coming,
chooses a quicker end, that means ought to be arranged and
respected.
For what follows it is necessary to acknowledge that there
are several versions of the life of dubious quality.
- There is the person who was born essentially legally
dead, or what is genteelly referred to as a persistent
vegetative state – PVS.
- There is the person who has, for whatever reason, slipped
into a permanent but persistent state of unconsciousness,
PVS, and depends on artificial support only for sustenance.
(This was Karen Ann Quinlan.)
- There is the person who has, for whatever reason, slipped
into a permanent but persistent state of unconsciousness or
unawareness and depends on artificial support for
respiration or circulation or both, as well as for
sustenance.
- There is the conscious person who depends on artificial
support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any
combination of the three, but who can persist indefinitely,
even function productively, with that support.
- There is the person who is conscious and aware but
severely mentally impaired, either from birth or from the
occurrence of some event, who is dependent on artificial
support for respiration, circulation, or sustenance, or any
combination of the three. (This is my son, Sam, who is
on “life support,” that is, a feeding tube, for sustenance
only.)
- There is the person who is apparently conscious but who
persistently has no apparent awareness of things and is
therefore dependent on artificial support for respiration,
circulation, or sustenance, or any combination of the
three. (This was Terri Schiavo, who was on “life
support,” that is, a feeding tube, for sustenance
only.)
- There is the conscious person who is enduring a slow,
agonizing death and who must gradually be brought under
artificial supports as well as treatment for pain.
- There is the unconscious person who is enduring a slow,
agonizing death and who must gradually be brought under
artificial supports as well as treatment for pain.
-There is the person who was apparently healthy only a few
days beforehand and who is rapidly slipping away due to a
virulent infection, other ravaging illness, or mysterious
causes.
And on it goes.
Given that I do not expect the U.S.A. to take from the
Terri Schiavo incident any cogent lesson (but rather, I
expect us to turn it over to Congress for endless, tiresome
“debate”) and that, therefore, I will one day want to spare
my loved ones the absolute whim of a court, for I seriously
anticipate arriving at a state of complete dependence some
day, I offer the following alternative. It is my hope that,
if the determination of my percentage of deadness is up to
a court to decide, then the court will consider this
analysis, or better still, will turn the matter over to my
family because I have had the good sense to give some
guidance here, thus sparing the court the trouble.
I should define clearly that my family, or loved ones, for
purposes of this question, are my wife and two biological
daughters. That's not to imply that I don't also love
someone else, but I don't want my other loved ones, however
many they may be, given control over my death or execution.
I'm sure the three I've named, or those that remain of the
three when my time comes, can readily come to one accord
and I bless that decision here and now.
If I am incompletely dead and anyone should suspect that
the best thing for them, for me, and for my fellow man is
that the rest of me should be put down, give me this test.
‘Yes’ answers point toward sustaining life, ‘No’ answers
point toward certain death.
Absent heroic measures and intensive testing:
1. Can I breathe on my own?
2. Does my heart beat reliably without external stimulus or
support?
3. Can I cooperate with my own feeding or care?
4. Am I (apparently or occasionally – briefly every day for
instance) conscious?
5. Perhaps restating #4, do I respond occasionally and
deliberately to questions, gestures, or touch, and do two
or more people agree that I do?
Given at least some intensive testing:
6. Am I free from virulent infection or other consumptive
disease that, in my state, is likely to kill me in a few
days anyway? (Note: ‘No’ means Yes I have such a
condition.)
7. Do I have any brain activity suggestive of awareness?
8. Is there a rational basis to assume I’ll ever again
become conscious or aware?
9. Are my ancillary systems such as kidneys functioning
with apparent intent to continue as they would if I were
normal for my age?
10. Do two or more dispassionate “experts” agree that I
have some residual cognitive consciousness, awareness, or
potential for recovering some rational conscious awareness?
Once this test has been given, if there is any disagreement
among my loved ones, I then suggest that two or more
dispassionate individuals be chosen by consensus of my
loved ones and be charged to interpret the results and
render their advice. I then enjoin my loved ones to accept
that advice. If I have, previous to becoming incapacitated,
expressed a desire to be supplied with the means to
artificially accelerate the end, that is, the means to
finish dying quickly, then I request that two or more
dispassionate individuals advise my loved ones on that
matter and that they likewise accept the advice, to the
extent that they may legally do so.
(I would not ask to have an assisted suicide arranged for
myself unless I were consciously aware of present or
impending unendurable pain.)
On the above test, if I score two or more on the Yes side
in #1 through #5, then I think I would like to be sustained
until it is more clear which way I will go. If I get one or
two in the Yes column on #1 through #5 but it’s doubtful,
then I would like to be sustained for a while if I also get
two more in the Yes column on #6 through #10. In no event
do I want to be kept alive for more than a year if I am
unconscious or apparently unaware throughout that time. I’d
probably be fine checking out after six months in that
state, but if more passionate individuals prevail, then let
them understand it just can’t go past a year.
HOW WOULD I HAVE YOU LET ME GO?
If I have become apparently unaware and there is no
prognosis for regaining awareness, as would be the case if
I were being consumed by a virulent infection or
metastasizing cancer, I also don't want to be kept "alive"
by heroic means. Here's an example how to interpret the
test above. If I'm not conscious, therefore on "life
support" for sustenance, AND if either my breathing or
heart won't keep going without tubes and wires, AND if I
ain't coming back from this situation, then give it a few
days if you must and then let me go. I don't consider Terri
Schiavo that far gone, by the way.
I participated in the decision to “unplug” my father only
four or five days after he had packed to leave the hospital
under his own power following surgery for lung cancer. But
he had a serious reversal, and the decision was simple when
the answer to #1 through #6 and #8 through #10 above was No
in every instance. I don’t remember whether #7 was
answered. Was that an execution? Nooooo, because he wasn’t
“put to death according to law.” It was a medical
determination, and the answer to #6 was the clincher. Life
support systems would have been insufficient to sustain him
for another day anyway. He drew his last breath two or
three minutes after being disconnected from the ventilator.
So, on the supposition that the national debate and clear
direction to the courts will not be forthcoming in my
lifetime, I wonder what I would prefer if I were not
clearly dead but were deemed by a court to be dead enough
to be finished off in some gruesome way - if I were in
Terri's predicament. And not only I, but if I am called
upon to concur that a person under my care and guardianship
is likewise due to be dispatched, these are a few of the
ways I’d consider among my options, for myself and for
someone else:
Starvation and thirst – The Terri
Schiavo solution. This is slow and, I must believe,
agonizing even to a person who is already partly or legally
dead. The brain stem is a powerful advocate for food and
water, and it is the brain stem that sustains respiration
and circulation. For me, at least, I would ask that my
guardians consider my will to eat and drink as strong as my
will to breath and pump.
Suffocation – Not with a pillow
pressed over the face. That would be too dramatic. Instead,
this could merely be a plastic tent placed over the head to
slowly reduce the supply of oxygen to my lungs. One assumes
that I wouldn’t have the involuntary reflex to strike the
tent away with my already-dead arms. As long as it was a
“natural” suffocation by merely depriving me of oxygen, in
the manner of starvation by merely depriving me of
sustenance, it would be a peaceful and efficient way to go,
and certainly quicker than starvation.
Drowning – Assuming a
compassionate intent to attend to the partly dead person’s
comfort – after all, we do surround them with pillows and
such – nothing is quite as soothing and comfortable as a
warm bath. I could be lowered into a bathtub, the warm
water could slowly be raised in the tub until it completely
covers me, I would inhale a little of it, and then it would
be over.
Freezing – This is a possibility
that removes most of the worry about the suffering that
some might ascribe to the previous methods. Even conscious
people “suffering” from hypothermia aren’t aware that they
are suffering. (Judges take note: People don’t feel it, as
those who’ve been rescued from the edge of
death-by-freezing have testified.) They become disoriented
– if I were already partly dead presumably I would already
be disoriented in the extreme – and then they slip from
consciousness, and then their systems quietly shut down. I
think freezing Terri Schiavo would have been more humane
than starving her.
Buried “alive” (but in fact partly
dead) – If I were partly dead but a consensus
couldn’t be reached concerning my wishes, I could be placed
into a coffin and lowered into a grave where any of the
foregoing consequences could take place and no one ever
need know which one succeeded.
Bleeding – If I’m already partly
dead and my heart and lungs haven’t the good sense to shut
down, this may be my first choice of a way to go. It would
be quick, and it would not need to be messy. I’ve already
donated roughly 80 units of blood in my “life”time, and
this would be a way of donating ten or so more units of
good blood under a controlled collection process. Then
someone else who is not already partly dead but in need of
more blood could be prevented from becoming partly dead. If
I’ve reached 90 donated units before I become partly or
legally dead, then finishing me off in this manner would
help me earn the coveted 100-unit pin!
Cremation – The opposite of
freezing. This has its advantages because it not only makes
one completely dead but also completely resolves the
secondary debate about what to do with the remains. I
frankly reject this solution for myself anyway, because I
cannot accept that I wouldn’t feel it. Cremation, however,
would be my disposal of choice once I am completely, 100%
dead dead. I am concerned that there isn’t enough land to
keep burying people and pets and plastic. Take the pressure
off the land and burn me up.
Natural disposal – A very simple
solution used by aboriginal Americans, according to pre-PC
literature on the American Indians. My partly dead body
could be placed onto a platform high above the ground, out
of sight of people who might find it distasteful to
accidentally glance upon the scene, and the crows and
vultures and other hungry creatures of nature could each
carry part of me away. Digested in this manner, it would be
nearly as efficient as cremation. And anyone who wants a
souvenir of me wouldn’t have to settle for a lock of my
hair. There are about 206 bones in the body, enough for all
my friends to have one after they’ve been cleaned of the
fleshy parts over a couple of weeks of exposure to nature.
I don’t think being picked apart in this manner would annoy
me. In fact, if I’m sufficiently disoriented, it might
tickle.
Lethal injection – This would be
fine but probably wouldn't be approved by any court
because it's too much like punishment, which is
what the judge ordered for Terri Schiavo, but we pretend
that it wasn’t a death sentence.
Assisted suicide – This is an
option under certain circumstances. If I am partly dead,
(dead enough to be put to death under a court order but too
weak to protest that I didn't commit any crime worthy of
execution), but still marginally conscious and able to
manipulate something, I might want to go this way. The type
of contraption that would make this effective would depend
on my residual voluntary abilities at that point and is
beyond the scope of this discussion.
ABOUT CITIZENSHIP AND ABOUT LIFE
There is but one matter left to consider. Whatever the
outcome of a national debate, and before it has been
decided, it simply makes sense that each of us should
prepare a living will. I have one, and it authorizes the
same people who would decide whether to sustain me by
artificial means, upon deciding not to, the option to then
authorize the removal of parts of my body, through
legitimate medical channels, to be used so that someone
else can live.
For it is life which I revere. I understand that just
living through one day at a time may be difficult for some,
can stink really. Suck even. I can’t invoke spiritual,
religious, or cosmic arguments here. Even though I am
guided by an authority above myself, I assume that
authority only over myself. When I assume that authority
over you also, you have the same right to rebel that I have
if you projected some alien authority over me. More
religious people are logical than logical people are
religious, and it is the intensely logical people who seem
most not to understand what the big deal is about Terri
Schiavo. I don’t condemn those who don’t understand. I
appeal to their logic.
Terri Schiavo, whatever she was – woman or vegetable – was
a citizen of the U.S.A. She was executed at a judge’s
order, and not by lethal injection or some other humane
means but by starvation and dehydration, which, if
inflicted upon a criminal would be condemned as a cruel and
unusual punishment. She was sentenced to death without a
criminal charge, a trial, or a conviction. What was done to
her cannot legally or ethically be done to a disobedient
dog. As a disabled person without a voice, she apparently
had forfeited her rights under the Americans with
Disabilities Act of 1990. One might have supposed that the
ADA, a federal act which presumably, until Terri Schiavo,
applied equally to all U.S. citizens, confers the right to
remain disabled indefinitely. That it does not is perhaps
the most frightening implication of this event to those of
us who care for the severely disabled.
It initially astonished me that those charged with carrying
out the sentence didn’t protest en masse and invite the
judge to come clamp her off himself, if that was his order.
I want to be charitable toward Michael Schiavo. He had
tried to do the right thing for his disabled wife all these
years and even, I heard, studied nursing and took time off
to nurse her himself. Eventually he wanted out, and the
history of the case shows that there have been earlier
attempts to do away with the nuisance that Terri had
become. He knew that there is a conventional way to dump a
wife you don't want to stay with, and that is divorce.
(There was some mumbling in the media that Florida made
that difficult for him. So what prevented him from dragging
her to Georgia?) There is an unconventional way, and that
is murder. And for him, because Terri was a unique burden,
there came a new, convenient way.
Never mind the accusations that it wasn’t until seven years
after she uttered it that he mentioned his wife's wish not
to be kept on life support if anything tragic ever
happened. Never mind the insinuation that it was the cash
from a malpractice settlement that motivated him to want
her dead rather than divorced. Never mind the other woman
and the second family he started. It comes to this: For
whatever reason, he wanted his wife out of the picture.
Instead of divorcing her, getting on with his life, and
letting Terri get on with hers – and who would have blamed
him? – he found an accomplice in a judge and a law that
could be twisted around her feeding tube, choking it off.
Is this how we all want to be treated? And is this the sort
of decision we want to inflict upon our families, whether
parents, children, or spouses, when we have become
burdensome and they have come to the end of their endurance
with us?
What defines life and therefore citizenship and therefore
protection under the law is not something to leave to the
politicians. The politicians get the second and third parts
of it, but the first part, the very definition of life,
must come from something deeper than politics and also
something more rational than religion. It must be found in
the soul of our culture and must be plain to all of us, or
else none of us is safe. We must debate it and we must
decide.
David A. Woodbury, 31 March 2005
www.DamnYankee.com ©2005
