Terry Shaivo [unfinished]

Originally, I wanted to make this column another partisan rant about Terri Shiavo in league with everything else filling the airwaves and op-ed pages of newspapers. I wanted to point out the ethical obscenity of a political party that has no problem having Medicaid paying most of the $80,000 a year medical bills of a brain dead women but refuses to discuss the possibility of making healthcare a not-for-profit industry like every other industrialized nation has. I wanted to dwell on how sad it is to see this helpless soul caught in the first bout of 2006 campaign posturing but then I realized I would be playing right into that very game and skirting more important issues.

Despite 65% of Americans realizing that this more a political circus than a morally driven crusade, most of us are genuinely concerned over the repercussions it will have on the American political landscape. This media circus spotlight on Shaivo highlights the deepest philosophical and ethical debate of our time: what is life worth and how equally distributed is that worthwhility?

To break my view of the Shaivo circus down to its crudest and truest form, it is my contention that in a world as ours of finite resources and starvation it is not worth the time or money to sustain the breath of a woman brain-dead for 15 years. Being that she has lost sentience – the ability to comprehend her own existence - she is merely a shell of human life. She is propped like a puppet with tubes instead of strings, complete with involuntary motor reflexes reacting to stimuli that captivate the true believers who desperately want to see consciousness churn beneath her eyes

My own feelings on the Shaivo case have begged difficult questions. Does a paralyzed deaf, mute, blind and severely retarded man have the same right to live as I do? What exactly would be the cognitive cut-off point where someone begins loosing their rights? Who decides?

I don’t think the questions get any easier for the right-wingers backing Shaivo’s parents. One could vaccinate 28,500 children in impoverished nations with the $80,000 a year it takes to keep Terri Shiavo breathing. That speaks nothing of the 43 million Americans without health insurance. The pro-life movement seems concerned with life only when it appears as a glow, a waxing or waning of pre-birth and near-death. What about preserving the life we already have?

Underling this entire debate is a perforated fantasy that almost every American believes in: no human has the right to kill another human. The holes become wider after terrorist attacks and serial killings. The holes become indefinable and smaller when it comes to civilian death in war, “collateral damage,” or unhooking the elderly from breathing tubes, or terminating pregnancies.

All life is not sacred to the vast majority of us. We pick and choose our [unfinished because it was unpublished [Richard wrote an editorial on this very topic to my surprise])