Who Lives? Who Dies? Who Decides?
Yet one paragraph earlier Kass had admitted, “I wouldn’t want to live that way. And I’m writing something down to inform my wife that if I am ever like that, they should let me die. But there was nothing in writing for Terri. And her parents want to care for her. Still, she’s being killed.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
A more important reason for the debate is that the issue deserves it. Kass is no hypocrite. He’s had a problem thinking consistent thoughts about Terri Schiavo, but so has everybody else. People who have had to make an end-of-life decision about someone they loved testify that principles collide, certainty vanishes, and the pain is everlasting. The ones who chose a swift over a slow and agonizing death don’t enjoy being called murderers. Yet Kass noticed that although the courts decided to allow Schiavo to die, she hadn’t been dying beforehand–she’d simply been depending on others for nourishment, as a baby or invalid does. Kass connected the dots between the helplessness of Schiavo and the helplessness of an unborn child. Rhetoricians on both sides of the debate are sensitive to this facile but usable analogy.
The distinction most of us would make between a disabled wife and a wife in a persistent vegetative state isn’t as clear to disabled activists, whose definition of “disabled” is expansive. Steve Drake, who was born hydrocephalic, is a leader of the Chicago group Not Dead Yet. I asked him if he would want to live as a vegetable. “This is a decision point I was lucky enough to pass by when I was born,” he replied. “The doctor pronounced me a vegetable. And when they use that word, you know what they’re going to say next. Fortunately, my parents didn’t like the term.”
“If you look at the rhetoric around so-called end-of-life issues,” he says, “the error talked about is only in one direction. Bioethicists say, ‘We don’t want to extend the dying process into this long, awful nightmare.’ That’s legitimate. But in your eagerness to do that you start creating another type of error, especially given the traditionally negative attitudes of people in the medical community to people with disabilities of all kinds.”
There’ve been no Sun-Times editorials on the upcoming District 39 election on April 5, and no articles either. But on March 21 occasional op-ed columnist Mary Laney wrote about “angry and frustrated” Wilmette parents who’d formed Citizens for Blue Ribbon Schools to take on the powers that be. These parents told her that test scores have been slipping since 2000, and they complained about the reading and math programs. Laney sympathized. Her column told of a time when she’d been unable to help her own son with his sixth-grade math because she didn’t understand it; recalling this “iconoclastic moment,” as she put it, filled her with “compassion” for the Blue Ribbon parents.
When Schnecke’s note reached Laney, she e-mailed back: “I have never been asked to write anything by anyone at the Sun-Times, nor anyone affiliated with anyone at the Sun-Times. For you to send a letter accusing me of being a paid ‘hit piece’ writer is pure libel. You should send an email to each and every person you sent your initial smear to correcting your dangerous assumptions.”
