Principles and Conscience

Terri Schiavo , the brain-damaged Florida woman at the heart of a gut-wrenching dispute over when and how life supposedly ends finally and mercifully died of starvation, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed by court order. And we are left to contemplate the moral conundrum of how doing the right thing in principle caused an atrocity in practice.

The principles of our Constitution were upheld, thereby sparing us the ramifications of the disturbing precedents that would have been set had federal intervention been successful. However, as I cheer for the victory of individual and states’ rights over dogmatic social conservatives and the self-aggrandizing politicians who pander to them, I could not, in my heart, easily reconcile this with the fact that this constitutional triumph caused a woman who was too incapacitated to feed herself to be denied nourishment until she died (we will never really know if she suffered, although the general consensus of medical experts is that there is no reason to believe that she would have felt anything).

Principles can be a real burden, sometimes. But that is no reason to surrender to the tempations of comfortably oversimplified thinking because it is very likely that Ms. Schiavo did not want to be kept alive in a persistent vegetative state and her right — which is also our right — to have her wishes respected and carried out is more important than the amelioration of the guilt pangs that resulted from the recognition of that basic human right.