A time to be born, and a time to die
No side in the painful debate over Terri Schiavo has a monopoly on moral seriousness. But those who decry the removal of her feeding tube are doing a much better job of making their case in moral terms.
You can blame the Religious Right for turning a family’s personal dilemm
a into a media circus. And you can reserve a special circle of Hell for the grandstanding politicians who are exploiting her life and her loved ones’ pain. You’d have less success, however, if you were to dismiss all the religious and ethical thinkers in Schiavo’s parents’ corner as kooks and hypocrites.
That’s because they speak of a concept that Jews, of all people, should appreciate: the sanctity of life. We introduced the idea of being created in God’s image, and our tradition is in many ways an attempt to distinguish life from death. Jews rarely speak of death as moving on to a “better place.” Ours is a tradition of the here and now, and when we say “choose life,” it is a statement that we value all attempts to lengthen our stay on this plane.
It is language echoed in statements like these, from the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano: “Who can judge the dignity and sacredness of the life of a human being, made in the image and likeness of God? Who can decide to pull the plug as if we were talking about a broken or out-of-order household appliance?”
The “culture-of-life” language, as it is becoming known, has been seized upon by conservatives. As former Regan speechwriter Peggy Noonan put it in The Wall Street Journal, supporters of Schiavo’s parents “do not want an innocent human life ended for what appear to be primarily practical and worldly reasons.”
Once the argument is framed in those terms, it is easy for Noonan to excoriate what she calls the “pull the tube” people. “Why are they so committed to this woman’s death?” she asks. “They seem to have fallen half in love with death.”
Those are low blows, and they demand that the ethicists who defend Michael Schiavo answer in similarly powerful expressions of moral principle — recognizing our own mortality, fostering humility in the face of natural processes, and acknowledging that compassion for those who suffer and sensitivity to a family’s dignity are also marks of a holy life.
But too often you hear talk of “procedure,” that the “courts have spoken,” and about the “rights” of Schiavo’s husband.
One of the most disappointing statements in this regard came from Arthur Caplan, the director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. In his regular column for MSNBC, he argued for ending Schiavo’s life as if he were compiling a legal brief. He invokes U.S. law, Michael Schiavo’s “rights,” and the power of the state courts. For Caplan, the Schiavo case boils down to this: “We have had a consensus in this country that you have a right to refuse any and all medical care that you might not want. Christian Scientists do not have to accept medical care nor do Jehovah’s Witnesses need to accept blood transfusions or fundamentalist Protestants who would rather pray than get chemotherapy. Those who are disabled and cannot communicate have the exact same rights. Their closest family members have the power to speak for them.”
And yet Caplan’s statement hardly speaks to those who consider the Schiavo case a debate about something far more fundamental than who gets to pull the plug.
Alan Mittleman, director of the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies, noted this disconnect within the medical community after his organization released a poll finding that most doctors supported removing Schiavo’s feeding tube.
“From a religious point of view, it is troubling that physicians are not more reluctant,” Mittleman, whose institute is connected to the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, said in a statement. “Religious communities are divided in their evaluations of active euthanasia — and for good reason. We must proceed very cautiously here.”
This week I asked Mittleman to elaborate on his statement. He suggested that the medical and bioethical community has seemed to reach a “consensus” that refuses to take up the challenge from Orthodox Jews and the Catholic Church. “I think those are valuable and prophetic voices to put to society,” Mittleman said. “The criterion in medical ethics has really been patient autonomy. And that is an elegant way for a rights culture, a liberal culture to settle the problem.”
Mittleman juxtaposes those views with that of what he calls “pre-liberal morality”: ethics that take into account “our duties to God,” and that “the duty to preserve life, regardless of the quality of life, outweighs personal considerations.”
As it turns out, there are morally serious thinkers on the side of Michael Schiavo and the millions of other family members who each year are empowered and burdened with decisions like his. Mittleman mentions Rabbi Elliot Dorff, rector at the University of Judaism, who wrote a responsum for the Conservative movement’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards saying that artificial nutrition and hydration should be classified as medicine. Dorff doesn’t write about rights, or courts, or jurisdiction. For him, end-of-life issues are about mortality, and compassion, and technological advances that have outpaced our limited theological understandings. In Jewish tradition, he writes, while we are not allowed to hasten the dying process, “we are not supposed to prolong it either.”
Dorff invokes Ecclesiastes, not the Florida Supreme Court, when he writes, “There is a time to be born and a time to die.”
A sizeable majority of Americans believe that Terri Schiavo’s time has come. For them, this is essential language. It suggests that God not only wants people to preserve life, but to decide when it is time to let go.