EASTER is a celebration of the triumph of life over death and of right over wrong. So it is peculiarly poignant that issues of life and death should be dominating the news this Easter, most dramatically so in the United States.
Last week, before the eyes of the whole world, the nation that has pledged to export its values to the rest of the globe set about starving and dehydrating one of its citizens to death. That it did so against the wishes of the president, Congress and
the people only added to the horror of the situation. If Terri Schiavo is still alive by the time you read this and there has been no new intervention, it will be her ninth day deprived even of water.
The Schiavo case has been hugely misrepresented in the media, not least by the BBC, which has reported it under a ‘Right to Die’ caption. It is not about the right to die: it is about the right to kill. The weasel term ‘persistent vegetative state’ has been attached to Mrs Schiavo, although her husband has refused to have her tested to establish her clinical status. Terri Schiavo is not a vegetable; she is not on a life-support machine; she does not have any tubes attached to her body. She has received visitors, out of bed and fully dressed. Her feeding tube was not "removed", since it had never been a permanent attachment: doctors, constrained by court order, stopped connecting it to her at mealtimes.
The Schiavo family has put some startling videos on the internet which show Mrs Schiavo making eye contact with her mother, smiling and visibly reacting to her. There is strong evidence she is not in a so-called persistent vegetative state. Dr William Hammesfahr, a Nobel Prize-nominated neurologist who has an international reputation for treating brain-injured patients, said earlier this month: "We, and others I know, have treated many patients worse than Terri and have seen them regain independence and dignity."
Hammesfahr was not speaking speculatively, as his further remarks show: "There are many approaches that would help Terri Schiavo. I know, because I had the opportunity to personally examine her, her medical records, and her X-rays."
Yet Mrs Schiavo’s medical records show she did not receive any rehabilitative therapy after 1993. Michael Schiavo, her husband, not only failed to procure such therapy but in 1993 tried to have antibiotics withheld from his wife when she was suffering from an infection; he was overruled by staff at the nursing home.
Schiavo, who has entered into a relationship with another woman by whom he has fathered two children, is the instigator of the move to end his wife’s life, despite the opposition of her parents and siblings. Where are the feminists in this fight for a woman’s life? What credibility does the "justice" system of the US retain when Judge George Greer presumes to make a clinical judgment that overrules Hammesfahr and hands down a death sentence on an innocent woman?
What must it be like to watch, helplessly, while food and water are denied you and you start to die by inches? If they did it to a laboratory rat, outraged activists would storm the building. Morality aside, this is being done on the authority of juju medical science. Some years ago, the British Medical Journal reported a study by clinicians of 40 patients referred to as being in a vegetative state; 43% were judged to have been misdiagnosed, although seven had been in this supposed state for more than a year and three of them for over four years.
The Schiavo case must provoke a political explosion in America. The crisis coincides with a mood of reappraisal in this country regarding issues of life and death, with abortion and sex selection of embryos by IVF parents registering on the political radar. The arrogance of politicians was epitomised by Tony Blair, who is conscientiously opposed to abortion but has voted 28 times to extend it - on four occasions up to full term. He claims he does not wish to impose his own beliefs on the public: it is a pity he did not exercise the same self-denying ordinance over WMD and war in Iraq.
Now he tells us abortion should not be an election issue. Unhappily for the Great Charlatan, it is the voters who will decide what is an election issue. If some feel it is more important to review the fact that almost seven million babies have been aborted in Britain since 1967, rather than to preview the putative public spending figures for 2012, that reflects the more principled priorities of electors than politicians.
Whether there is a genuine moral revolution under way is a different question. The reality is we now have abortion on demand: one pregnancy in four ends in this way. Reducing the legal time limit from 24 to 20 weeks is patently a reaction to the vivid images of babies in the womb brought to us by advancing science. Yet there is no intrinsic difference between an infant in the 140th day of its life and the 141st: gestation is a seamless progress, only conception and birth are major transitions.
If it is only squeamishness over the obvious destruction of a child that is disturbing the public, displacement of surgical by chemical abortion will eventually anaesthetise opinion. The Christian stance is well known. Yet abortion presents a challenge to the humanist conscience. Why is it assumed that non-believers should be pro-abortion? Should not those who have no belief in an afterlife value this life all the more?
A similar concern is destruction of human embryos, intrinsic to IVF. It is outrageous that the most crucial decisions made have been relegated to a quango, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, with Parliament recusing itself from responsibility since 1990. The traffic lights on the road to perdition are permanently at green: not only is human cloning now legal, but the latest obscenity canvassed last week is human/animal cross mutation.
"I thirst" was among the last words on the Cross. A human being dying of dehydration in Holy Week has an apocalyptic resonance. This Easter we must pledge ourselves to moral regeneration, reasserting our human dignity and the inviolability of all innocent life.
