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Voices of the Northwest
On Death: Our Challenged Autonomy
What the real lesson of the Schiavo case means for natural death and Oregon's Death with Dignity Act
By Russell Sadler
Posted on Apr 22, 2005 |
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God has a plan for your life -- or perhaps not. This is a political column. We will leave that question to the religion of your choice.
But Christian Republicans have a plan for your life and you are expected to accept it whether you agree with it or not.
In the detritus-strewn wake of the Terri Schiavo media circus The Weekly Standard, a neo-conservative newspaper in Washington, D.C., published a radical article by Eric Cohen. His position is so extreme it is worth quoting at length:
“[T]he real lesson of the Schiavo case is not that we all need living wills; it is that our dignity does not reside in our will alone, and that it is foolish to believe that the competent person I am now can establish, in advance, how I should be cared for if I become incapacitated and incompetent. The real lesson is that we are not mere creatures of the will: We still possess dignity and rights even when our capacity to make free choices is gone; and we do not possess the right to demand that others treat us as less worthy of care than we really are ... [T]he autonomy regime, even at its best, is deeply inadequate. It is based on a failure to recognize that the human condition involves both giving and needing care, and not always being morally free to decide our own fate,” writes Cohen.
Re-read that last line carefully because you will be hearing more on this theme from Christian Republican operatives who will take up Cohen’s theme -- although they will first convene focus groups to come up with a less rhetorically-challenged phrase than “autonomy regime” to deny all Americans the right to decide their own fate.
If we are not always morally free to decide our own fate, then who decides? Cohen implies government should decide, because he suggest “the law” should be revised to reflect the notion that humans are not morally free to decide their own fate.
Who is this guy? Eric Cohen is a “scholar” and “editor” with the grandly named Ethics and Policy Center in Washington, D.C. According to its website, the EPC was founded in 1976 to “reinforce the bond between Judeo-Christian moral tradition and public debate over domestic and foreign policy issues.”
It is probably more accurate to describe the Center’s mission as finding ways to impose fundamentalist Protestant and ultra-orthodox Catholic religious dogma on non-believers using the authority of secular government.
The EPC was initially funded by grants from the “Four Sisters” -- the Bradley, Olin, Smith Richardson and Sarah Scaife foundations -- that supply so much of the mother’s milk of politics to far-right propaganda mills and their “position papers.”
Cohen's notion that Americans are not morally free to decide their own fate is not only an attack on the concept of “living wills,” it is aimed directly at Oregon’s Death with Dignity initiative now being challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court.
If you talk with Oregonians who are thinking about physician-assisted suicide if they become terminally ill, one word comes up more frequently than any other -- autonomy. This should not be surprising in a state with Oregon’s independent, maverick political tradition.
The Death with Dignity initiative passed by just 32,000 in 1994, so opponents would not accept Oregon’s decision. Catholic, Mormon, and several sorts of Baptist interest groups spent $5 million in a effort to repeal the law in 1997. They got handed their heads. The repeal effort failed in 33 of Oregon’s 36 counties with 60 percent of the voters opposing it. The voters, as they say, had spoken. But the Christian Republicans will not accept that answer. Oregon’s law -- which has been upheld in every court so far -- is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.
It should not be surprising that Oregonians want their autonomy as advances in medical technology virtually eliminate the concept of a natural birth or death. It is technologically possible to keep a body physically functioning indefinitely. A death now is almost always a decision for families and their doctors. Traditionally it has been confined to those parties and winds up in court only if there is a disagreement among them.
But now we have an argument that takes a particular religious notion -- we are not morally free to determine our own fate -- and uses the power of the secular government to impose it on everyone.
This is a fight between two warring conservative factions -- the stifling social control of Bible Belt conservatism and libertarians who want every policy decision to maximize individual freedom. The rest of us cannot afford to sit on the sidelines while these two forces duke it out over “our” autonomy. Without individual autonomy there is no freedom as Americans traditionally conceive it.
Copyright © 2005 by Russell Sadler
Russell Sadler is a journalist and a lecturer at Southern Oregon University. You may write him c/o publisher at westbynorthwest.org. Visit Sadler's Sense column's at West By Northwest.org:
Sadler's Sense: Who Is in Charge of the State's Purse?
Sadler's Sense: The Risks of Shifting Higher Ed.'s Costs and Who Pays
Sadler's Sense: The Good Ship School Finance Is Sinking
Sadler's Sense: Infrastructure Renewal Needed
Sadler's Sense: The Unlikely Poster Child for Measure 37
Sadler's Sense: Of Myths, Money and Machines, Why We Blame the Owl
Sadler's Sense: Not Window Dressing
Sadler's Sense: From Constantine to George, God's Will and Secular Power
Sadler's Sense: Credibility or State of Our State
Sadler's Sense: Look in the Mirror, Oregon
Sadler's Sense: Why We Must Pay the Piper Now
Sadler's Sense: A Short History of Measure 30
© Copyright 2000-2004 by West By Northwest.org
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