![]() That technology is ours to invent, and it is ours to wrestle with the questions of life and death that this technology affects. You cannot say it is God’s will that Terri Schiavo live another ten years so that human beings might invent a technology which will restore her to a fuller life. You cannot see God in one decision and absent him in the next. You cannot say that it is human intervention to pull the tube and forget it was human intervention to insert it. A century ago there was no feeding tube: Terri Schiavo would have died a long time ago.Ī feeding tube, a machine, a new medical technology: these are human things, human decisions, as surely as the human decision to unplug the machine or withdraw the tube. If these are God’s will, then God Himself does not err on the side of life, God Himself chooses death, for not all the things which may yet exist to save our lives exist now, and they did not exist yesterday. ![]() He does not invent new medical technologies. He does not hook them to breathing machines. God does not put feeding tubes in people. As soon as you open the door a crack to allow that God wishes us to contrive our own ways and means of protecting life, of healing the sick, of staving off death-as soon as you stand behind feeding tubes, breathing machines, and so on, not to mention surgical intervention, artificial limbs, organ transplants, antibiotics, as soon as you stand like Randall Terry and say, “New medical technologies are just around the corner,” you’ve long since accepted that human beings contrive on matters of life and death, that the mystery of God’s plan for each of us runs straight through the will of human society. That is true submission to the will of God, as it appears in such a characterization. The only really consistent implementation of the implications of the argument for “culture of life” as it has appeared in recent months is found in those forms of Christianity whose adherents refuse all medical interventions whatsoever. It’s why the Catholic Church’s attention to these matters is philosophically coherent, and American evangelicals who came along for the ride in the Schiavo case appear so manipulative or self-serving in contrast.Įven the Catholic argument is problematic when it comes up against the fact that the preservation of life in any of these contexts always involves the active agency of human beings. This is the keystone of the official Catholic theology on these subjects, that human beings should not contravene God’s will by deciding for ourselves who lives and who dies, by making the hour of our deaths a matter of human contrivance. But most of them also spoke of the mystery of God’s will. I’ve been rolling that around in my head a lot, because it seems to reflect something really odd in the attitude of the many of the most strident activists who demanded that Schiavo retain her feeding tube. He said (I’m paraphrasing here) that it was important to keep Schiavo alive because there might be medical technologies coming any day which would restore her consciousness or improve her condition. The day before Terri Schiavo died, I happened to hear Randall Terry on NPR talking about the case. Slow blogging for now, both because I'm horribly overwhelmed with work and because I'm slogging away at a transfer of this blog to WordPress, which involves some drudgery AND a learning curve. Update your addresses: Easily Distracted is now at.
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