First I would like to thank meghatronn, some unknown commenter on Joe Duffy’s blog, for finding Joint Statement On The Vegetative State from the International Congress On Life-Sustaining Treatments and Vegetative State: Scientific Advances and Ethical Dilemmas” (ROME, 10-17 March 2004). I most likely would not have found it otherwise. I would like to praise Fr. Pollard at St. Veronica’s for his question and answer section of the bulletin that pointed me to John Paul II’s address to the aforesaid conference, again because I doubt I would have found it otherwise.
I have been pondering this for some time, essentially since reading it on Easter, trying to get my thoughts into some sort of order, so as to sound, and be, coherent, but have largely failed. This then will be largely incoherent. It is not that the Church is being unclear here, but rather that there are a couple different ways my mind tends to go on this sort of thing, and my ever present tendency is to tangent endlessly.
John Leo in “<ahref=”http://www.townhall.com/columnists/johnleo/jl20050328.shtml”>Red
and blue bioethics” talks about how bioethics moved, even in Catholic circles, at least in the United States, from the sanctity of life to “quality of life,” an ambiguous phrase that has lead in many cases to legalized euthanasia. The Church clearly and consistently comes down against this, and does not fail to here. It differentiates the so called “persistent vegetative state” from the sort of thing my mom witnessed a few years ago as my 98 year old great-great aunt (might be another “great” in there, I am unsure) slowly died. She was not on a feeding tube, but one would have only prolonged her life by a short amount, if at all, as the rest of her body was shutting down anyway. With a “persistent vegetative state,” you really never know for sure that the person will not come out of it. As I have provided links here, people have come out even after hugely extended periods of time such as 20 years.
Secondly, the Vatican notes that it does not really matter if the person can come out of it or not. This is something that is hard to understand, just as the book of Job is hard to understand. But there is a value in suffering, we are taught that consistently by the Church, by the bible, by the example of the saints. As people in a “persistent vegetative state” need only the feeding required by us all, the Church finds that they cannot be considered “terminal” patients. Thus the whole discussion of “allowing the person to die” is misplaced: it is not a question of them dieing normally or not, but of them being denied basic care or not. Someone in Joe’s blog pointed out this article which quotes a “Catholic” bio-ethicist, a Jesuit who, like many of his brothers, has become lost and confused in modernity (referring to time, not the heresy, though that reading might just be accurate also). He uses as an example a case of a person needing partridge eggs, which were very expensive and exotic in the 16Th century, to live. Would a 16Th century family have been obliged to buy them? The ethicists of the time said no, and if the family of Mrs. Schiavo were in fact unable to afford a feeding tube, perhaps we would come to the same answer today.
The Vatican addresses this: recognizing the necessity of such a conclusion, it calls for society, in which it includes the Church, and private efforts as well as government, to take on this cost, rather than placing it on the family alone. Specifically in this case, it cannot be called an extraordinary when he won, and has not used, a one million dollar settlement, which he claimed would be used to support her. Further, her family is willing and able to take on the financial burden from him, lending more than sufficient evidence to the fact that it is not financially extraordinary.
Ederlyn recently stated that she is “coming to the conclusion that politics will not ever come close to the difficult ideals of free will and charity that [she is] seeking to come closer towards.” I went rather further in my reply, which she may or may not have appreciated. I said that it cannot handle many situations. Poverty, health care, support for the aging, and other situations that life brings to many are beyond the reach of government. For this reason in the Middle Ages, the government did not try. In those simple times when Church and State were not clearly split, the State simply assigned to the Church certain revenue streams, with which the monasteries implemented social justice. Significantly, Belloc demonstrates that the cost of living increased as the State reclaimed these lands and revenues and distributed them to “private” (secular lords instead of ecclesiastical authority) control.
I read somewhere that a government can tend towards either justice or order, but not both, and that the further it tends towards one, the less it will achieve the other. The mental image here is of a V, intersecting lines, that diverge by more and more as you travel down either one from the point of intersection. My immediate response is that since the protestant heresy, governance in, in the protestant and secular dominated countries at least, has tended towards order, not justice. Communism clearly tended this way: classify everyone, each person just a replaceable clog. The injustice of this was also clear, it denied the person-hood of each individual, denied their inherent worth. Our own government tends towards order over justice also however, though in perhaps less obvious ways. That tendency is inherent, though not explicit, in our choice to be safe over free, and in our choice to avoid offending rather than free. As our schools suppress free speech, and as our students claim that it they do not see the need for it, as we restrict travel, and track our citizens we trade off the ability to adapt to the uniqueness of each person. We can no longer handle a person not having identification (see Gilmore v Ashcroft), an inherently unjust situation, because we have chosen the to order everyone by their identity (you can fly, you cannot, classify classify classify …). We are told this makes us safer, that is debatable, but it certainly makes us less free, and certainly violates justice (perhaps only in exceptional circumstances, but still). A simplistic example perhaps, and also likely one that most people would consider insignificant. Other examples are possible, I have used and made others at various times, but this is the one that comes easily to mind now, and so I let it rest on it, for now.
As predicted, I have wandered down a tangent, and at length, I will not redact that tangent, though I may at some point single it out for further consideration in isolation. And yet, the
two are not even all that unrelated. In Mrs. Schiavo’s case, we again see a favoring of order over justice. Our courts are bound by precedent, and bound to hold up the “findings of fact” from the lower court, and over turn only errors of law or process. Thus each successive court has upheld the finding that the husband can remove her feeding tube. The only real question was and is why the Federal courts choose not to look at the case fresh, as I am consistently told that the Congress and President Bush intended it should. Precedent says that “similar” cases should end in the same result, this is one in which the demands of justice and order are incredibly close, I do not much object to it. Declaring that in all situations the spouse is the “next of kin” and granting the authority to make these calls to the “next of kin” alone, however, is nothing of justice, and everything of order.
In justice, the husband clearly gave up his moral authority by the “conflict of interest” (in legal terms) of living with some other woman. Were divorce legitimate, the grounds for making a case of abandonment is clear. The desire of order and precedent here combine however to cause the court to ignore this conflict, and grant him this authority. It is makes this case the same as every other to state that regardless of special circumstances (his desertion of her), he is yet, and alone, responsible for her fate. Justice would demand that the exceptional circumstance result in an exceptional ruling, precedent would allow it, but order demands classification and generalization. Reduce this to the framework, apply the specified result. Sentencing guidelines. Formulaic laws. Arguments from precedent alone rather than natural law as well.
