While You Were Sleeping

Renew America ^ | 03/19/2005 | Adam Graham

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I have no new teaching for America. I seek only to recall you to faithfulness to what you once taught the world. Your nation was founded on the proposition — very old as a moral precept, but startling and innovative as a political insight — that human life is a gift of immeasurable worth, and that it deserves, always and everywhere, to be treated with the utmost dignity and respect. —Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

As I write this, Terri Schiavo is starving to death. Unless Congress, the President, the Florida State Senate, or the Governor of Florida take action, she'll die within a week or so, perhaps sooner.

The evidence has been brought forth by both sides. It has been discussed and rehashed a hundred times. There are many smoke screens and rabbit trails. The question before us is fundamental. Either we value human life or we don't. Either we care for the defenseless or we throw them to the curb with the trash.

Terri Schiavo is seriously disabled and may never recover fully yet she is a living, breathing human being. She is not terminally ill. In a few days, as things stand now, she will die a death hundreds of times longer than most serial killers for the simple reason that she's inconvenient. Perhaps, this shouldn't shock us, after all we've killed 40 million unborn children for the same reason. She'll die most of all, because a lot of people simply don't care and they should.

If you can have no compassion for Terri, weep for yourselves, for what you will see with your own eyes. The value of Human Life is going to sink like a rock. There are a lot of people who are quite inconvenient for society. We spend billions upon billions of dollars in personal, taxpayer, and charitable funds on helping those who have Alzheimer's, AIDS, Cancer, and various other incurable diseases. Why care for the mentally retarded, the baby with Down's syndrome, or the crack baby? At what point does the lack of hope for a good life give us the right to starve someone to death? This will be the question.

With entitlements threatening to bankrupt our country, you can bet euthanasia will become an option in our current culture of death. By the government limiting life spans to 70 years, Social Security could remain solvent without any changes. Thus, the generation that aborted its children for convenience may find itself being euthanized for convenience.

The issue is not just the life of an innocent woman, but the type of society we will live in. A society that will allow the destruction of Terry Schiavo today can just as easily allow you or I to be killed for whatever expedient reason is given. Never have the words of the poet John Donne been more true:

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.