It's over


Terry Schiavo is dead

I just read the news that Terri Schiavo died earlier today (3/31/05). Presumably, all the protesters can now pack up and go home, and Michael Schiavo and Terri's parents can (one hopes) get on with their lives and (perhaps) learn to forgive each other.

Perhaps, since both sides to the dispute agree that there will need to be an autopsy, we'll find out for sure whether there was ever a chance for Terri to ever have a "normal" life again. My bet: there was no hope; much of her cerebral cortex had deteriorated and was replaced by fluid. There was never any hope that she would ever again function normally.

With all due respect to some of my fellow evangelical Christians, I did not find this to be the easy decision they appear to favor. Erring "on the side of life" rings a bit hollow after 15 years with no change for the better. The currently most famous evangelical, Rick Warren, had some comments about this in an answer to a question when he was on Larry King Live. Here is the exchange:

CALLER: I am so tired of people who are so sure they're speaking for god. And how can you say that Terri Schiavo is not on life support when she can't even feed herself. And on top of that, everyone that I have seen die was not brain dead at the moment they died.

WARREN: Well, you're bringing up two different issues. First, life support does not mean feeding somebody. Life support means your artificially kept alive. She's not artificially kept alive. She's kept alive by the same way you're kept alive. And if you stopped eating, you'd die and if you stopped drinking, you'd die faster. So, that's not life support, that's just called living. In the second place, in brain activity, she clearly has brain activity, because she's smiling. She's responding. She's laughing. And I just don't have the right to take somebody else's life. That's not my right.

You can read the whole transcript here. Most of it is not about Terri.

On the other side is evangelical Jon Fortt, a reporter at the San Jose Mercury News, who says in his Cross Blog:

More troubling to me is the position on the right. (I’m not saying that every conservative holds this position, or that every evangelical holds this position.) On the right, it appears some people have begun worshipping human life itself.

This “life worship” mindset is evinced when we hear politicians and other leaders talking about the Schiavo case and the “sanctity of human life” or the “culture of life.”

Christians: Since when is human life holy? Since when is our culture merely about living?


There's much more here. Even Christians are divided on this issue, obviously.

Perhaps the autopsy will resolve the question whether there was ever any hope of Terri regaining a normal life.

Posted: Thu - March 31, 2005 at 09:51 AM        

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