Comment are off

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW SPRING 2003

the HUMAN LIFE ItEVIEW SPRING 2003 Featured in this issue Stephen Vincent on Scheidler's Supreme Victory William Murchison on Cloning Religion Maureen L Condie on Defining Life Rita L Marker on Patience Plastic Bags Unspeakable Conversations A Symposium Nat Hentoff George McKenna David S Oderberg Mark Pickup Wesley J Smith J0 McGowan and Harriet McBryde Johnson Also in this issue Ned Rice 0 Cathleen A Cleaver Nelson Lund Kathryn Jean Lopez Lawrence B Lindsey William L Saunders Published by The Human Life Foundation Inc New York New York Vol XXIX No 2 7.00 a copy

ABOUT THIS ISSUE readers of this journal have followed the progress of the Australian philosopher Peter Singer for years Last February the vast readership of the New York Times Magazine got a bracing introduction to the Ivy League infanticide champion in a cover story titled Unspeakable Conversations or How I Spent One Day as a Token Cripple at Princeton University by Harriet McBryde Johnson We thought it would make for a provocative symposium and as you'll see our distinguished participants haven't let us down Many thanks to Ms Johnson and to the New York Times for giving us pern1ission to reprint her riveting tale Those who've joined us since the appearance of our Fall 1998 symposium Infanticide Chic II Professor Singer Goes to Princeton can receive a copy by calling our office at 212 685 5210 or by emailingusathumanlifereview mindspring com Long time contributor Bill Murchison returns to our pages with a timely article Cloning Stem Cells and Religion He also has news Last fall after years of writing for the Dallas Morning News Bill became the Radford Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Baylor University in Texas nice to know there are a few universities where prolifers can still apply Bill's syndicated column by the way continues to run and can be accessed along with columns by virtually every other important conservative commentator at the invaluable website Townhall com Another favorite website is National Review Online nationalreview com headed up by the tireless Kathryn Jean Lopez Thanks to NRO for permission to reprint columns by Ned Rice and Nelson Lund Lopez herself has a column in this issue one she wrote for the National Catholic Register ncregister com Thanks to our friends over there for allowing us to bring you that and another Register column by Cathleen Cleaver Our thanks also go the Family Research Council frc org from whose recent publication Building a Culture ofLife 30 Years after Roe v Wade we've reprinted Cloning in Light of the Nuremberg Code by William L Saunders And to First Things jirstthings com where Maureen L Condie's Life Defining the Beginning by the End first appeared Finally gracias to the Weekly Standard weeklystandard com this time for a column by Lawrence Lindsey October 17 is the fifth anniversary of the death of our founding editor J P McFadden who first wrote about Peter Singer in these pages in 1983 The Human Life Foundation will hold a fundraising dinner on that day to help assure the survival of the Review which Jim considered his most important legacy Details are on page 93 We hope some of you may be able to join us ANNE CONLON MANAGING EDITOR

INDEX

Editor Maria McFadden Senior Editors Ellen Wilson Fielding Faith Abbott McFadden John Muggeridge William Murchison Managing Editor Anne Conlon Consulting Editor Europe Mary Kenny London Contributors Lynette Burrows James Hitchcock Rita L Marker William McGurn George McKenna Mary Meehan David Quinn Wesley 1 Smith Business Manager Rose Flynn DeMaio Production Manager Ray Lopez Publishing Consultant Edward A Capano Founding Editor J P McFadden Published by THE HUMAN LIFE FOUNDATION INC Editorial Office 215 Lexington Avenue 4th Floor New York N Y 10016 The editors will consider all manuscripts submitted but assume no responsibility for unsolicited material Editorial and subscription inquiries and requests for reprint permission should be sent directly to our editorial office Subscription price 25 per year Canada and foreign 30 U S currency ISSN 0097 9783 2003 by THE HUMAN LiFE FOUNDATION INC New York N Y Printed in the U S A the HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Spring 200 Vol XXIX No 2 Introduction 2 Maria McFadden Scheidler's Supreme Victory 7 Stephen Vincent Cloning Stem Cells Religion 14 William Murchison Life Defining the Beginning by the End 22 Maureen L Condie Assisted Suicide Activism Patience and Plastic Bags 30 Rita L Marker Unspeakable Conversations A Symposium Harriet McBryde Johnson 47 Nat Hentoff 64 George McKenna 67 David Oderberg 74 Mark Pickup 79 Wesley J Smith 83 Jo McGowan 88 Appendices 94 Ned Rice Cathleen A Cleaver Nelson Lund Kathryn Jean Lopez Lawrence B Lindsey William L Saunders

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION THE YEAR 2003 MARKS the 30th anniversary of the shameful Supreme Court decision of Roe v Wade but it will also go down in history as the year the Supreme Court righted a great wrong On February 26 the Court ruled 8 1 in favor of Joe Scheidler in Scheidler v NOW a case which had as Stephen Vincent writes in our lead lasted 17 years and come to symbolize the struggle between the culture of life and the culture of death Review readers are already well versed in the famous case in which the National Organization for Women tried and initially succeeded with a Chicago federal court conviction in 1998 in getting Scheidler and two other prolife activists convicted for conspiracy under RICO the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act they were slapped with the treble damages allowed under RICO Our Summer 1998 symposium The RICO Outrage Are Pro Lifers Really Mafia Mobsters included a contribution from RICO's author Notre Dame law professor G Robert Blakey who said it was a legal outrage to use RICO as a weapon of terror against civil protest In our Fall 2000 issue journalist Richard Goldkamp revisited the Chicago trial exposing glaring inconsistencies between what was alleged in court about the actions of the protestors and what corresponded with the facts on record discrepancies the media never bothered to explore Goldkamp concluded that the case would probably go to the Supreme Court The defendants best hope he wrote may lie in one key point Sharp doubts have been raised about RICO's use in other cases He was right Now Stephen Vincent has written a rousing article about the final chapter Scheidler's victory which is a victory not only for all pro life activists but for activists of any stripe who could have been silenced under a manipulated interpretation of RICO indeed amicus briefs for the Supreme Court case made for some pretty disparate bedfellows as you'll read Vincent's piece has at its center the figure of a man whose larger than life personality Joe's colorful quotable and irrepressible and unquenchable dedication to the unborn made him in many ways NOW's worst nightmare The Scheidler decision is one more indication that the liberal tower of choice constructed in the Seventies is beginning to totter as the support base ages and thins It is as Vincent admits far too soon to sound the death knell of the abortion mindset However it seems that abortion advocates are increasingly on the defensive these days from NOW protesting too much that their loss in the RICO case wasn't really a setback to former Planned Parenthood president Faye Wattleton trying to explain why her own poll she is now head of the Center for the Advancement of Women a pro choice advocacy 2 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEw group that recently surveyed public opinion on abortion found that 51 percent of American women favor the government prohibiting abortion or limiting it to extreme cases to NOW dealing with the public outcry over a revealing statement made by its New Jersey chapter head regarding the Laci and Conner Peterson homicide cases for more on that story see Kathryn Jean Lopez's column Appendix D No the battles ofthe culture war are far from over but at least the ground is shifting Yet even as technological innovations such as the sonogram are leading people to see that fetuses are human lives and must be protected the wonders of modem science have opened up new and dangerous frontiers The issues of embryonic stem cell research and cloning issues that advocates say involve life that is expendable because it is so small hold tremendous import for our future Senior Editor William Murchison who is currently teaching journalism at Baylor University contributes a reflection inspired by one of his c1asses Cloning Stem Cells and Religion These matters have a different feel Murchison says than the abortion and euthanasia wars at least in the way they are overwhelmingly portrayed The look is of well scrubbed laboratories gleaming test tubes the look of Science And not just Science but the promise however theoretical of wonderful cures to awful diseases nothing less than the Betterment of Humanity However there is so much glare from well scrubbed labs that a crucial fact is obscured any progress that might be gained will come from experimenting on lives destroyed in the process the type of horror denounced in the Nuremberg Code see Appendix F Murchison argues that the ethics of the matter are urgent But more urgent still is the theology because ethics may not be able to hold the rampart forever against cloning The hereand now suffering caused by Alzheimer's and Parkinson's clouds the field of ethics which already has bio ethicists making assurances that embryos are only being destroyed for a great good But bring God into the equation and the answers will be different Murchison makes the salient point that despite the low place theology has at the American table in the age of pluralism without priests and preachers engaging God in the debate abortion advocates might long ago have triumphed Instead because of the persistence of those who insist on referencing the Creator we are daring to hope that the tide may be turning Professor Maureen Condie who is a neurobiologist wrote an article for First Things which we reprint as a remarkable follow up to Murchison Condic doesn't discuss theology yet her exploration of the biological facts makes a marvelous case supporting the sanctity of life She looks first at our definition of death as she explains there is a broad social and legal consensus regarding when human life ends Legally brain death is the definition of deathonce the brain ceases functioning the bodily functions begin to break down But this is not instantaneous the heart may beat for a while and on a cellular SPRING 2003 3

and molecular level nothing changes immediately What has changed is the ability of the body's parts to function together as an integrated whole Condie underlines the importance of the distinction between cell life and the life of an organism this is precisely the important distinction to be made at the beginning of life as well Embryos are organisms not merely collections of human cells but living creatures with all the properties that define any organism The embryo generates and organizes distinct tissues that function in a coordinated manner to maintain the continued growth and health of the developing body For Condic it's simple Linking human status to the nature of the developing embryo is neither subjective nor open to personal opinion She then goes on to skewer other arguments used to justify the destruction of embryos for example that to be human you have to look human and embryos look like a ball of cells Fundamentally this argument asserts that human life is worthy of respect depending on appearance What level of malformation are we willing to accept before we revoke the right to continued existence In our final regular article we move to another kind of discussion about the end of life Contributor Rita Marker director of the International Anti Euthanasia Task Force recently infiltrated two major conferences of key activists in the movement to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide In her report for the Review Marker begins by noting the general disappointment among proeuthanasia activists that things have not moved faster since their victory in Oregon and describes two very different approaches proposed for going forward She introduces us to the gatherings main participants their personalities affiliated organizations goals and pet projects like the appalling Exit Bag Marker lets us in on the macabre marketing that's been used to publicize that contraption Despite the frustration evident in the movement and the differing opinions about which is the best winning strategy Marker warns us not to let our guard down these activists are just as dangerous as ever She ends with a case in point a poignant story of a woman whose husband unbeknownst to her let some Caring Friends hasten him to an early death and rob her of any chance to stop him let alone say goodbye The remainder of our article section is dedicated to a symposium Unspeakable Conversations The occasion was a cover story in the New York Times Magazine February 16 which featured a photograph of a woman in a wheelchair her body albeit graceful contorted with this headline Should I Have Been Killed at Birth The case for my life The story title Unspeakable Conversations Or How I Spent One Day as a Token Cripple at Princeton University was written by Harriet McBryde Johnson a lawyer and a disability rights activist In it she tells of her debate in March 2002 with Princeton's resident death guru Peter Singer Professor Singer of course sits in an Endowed Chair from which he advocates not only abortion but infanticide euthanasia suicide even bestiality as long as neither man nor beast gets 4 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REviEw hurt I have to admit that at first I was greatly heartened that a remarkable prolife argument Johnson both embodies and presents one had made it to the cover of the Times Magazine Johnson makes a strong case for the rights and worth of the disabled from her stance as an atheist a valuable approach for Times readers who are accustomed to seeing any pro life argument linked with religion But much of the article is taken up with her own inner dialogue about whether or not she should have agreed to a civil debate with a man who many think is nothing less than a monster On further reflection knowing the Times usual agenda re abortion and euthanasia I had to wonder about the editors motivation were they killing two birds giving a nod to the rights of the disabled while at the same time slyly giving Singer another forum to come off as not such a bad guy Because to put it too simply that seems to be what Johnson concludes And this is a point of contention in several of the commentaries that follow We sent Johnson's article to six distinguished Review contributors and invited their responses starting with the question Should Johnson have debated Singer Nat Hentoff who needs no introducton to Review readers was a natural first choice As he writes Singer is actually More Dangerous than a Monster because he's tenured Hentoff winces at Johnson's praise for Singer's manners and intellect Still he believes Johnson made the right choice as her article was A chance for millions of readers to see not in the abstract but a living immediate refutation of Singer's lethal and influential utilitarian doctrine that certain lives are not worth living Following Hentoff is Professor George McKenna who passionately disagrees He asks So what do you do with people who preach child murder you deal with him by protests posters petitions picket lines civil disobedience pointed questions shouted across a room You don't have a civil debate with him Harriet McBryde Johnson for reasons that do not seem clear even to her decided to sleep with the enemy Professor David Oderberg first commends Johnson for bravery and dignity but then he insists that one must nonetheless look at what Singer really advocates not what he says in polite conversation And he proceeds to layout the damning evidence of Singer's official record which he knows all too well For example while readers of Miss Johnson's article might get the impression that Singer never advocates killing as an obligation in fact he believes in a utilitarian duty to kill especially in the case of a disabled infant like the one Miss Johnson once was Mark Pickup a disability rights activist himself wrote a response which focuses mostly on his dismay at Johnson's profession of atheism which he thinks blinds her to Singer's evil He sees no real ammunition against Singer's deadly worldview without reliance on the principles at the core of the Judaeo Christian tradition A position Hentoff also an atheist might dispute SPRING 2003 5

Oft time contributor and powerful anti euthanasia advocate Wesley Smith writes next asking the reader to face some painful facts Rather than a debate with Singer prompting dangerous exposure to his ideas his ideas are the ones already out there he is already seen as legitimate Good grief he wrote the essay on ethics for the Encyclopedia Britannica We are the ones now who have a hard time getting our voices heard So however distasteful it is engaging in a debate with a figure like Singer guarantees a wider audience for our opposing view although Smith agrees that the Times published Johnson's article because it can be construed as defending Singer We began with Johnson's story in her own voice giving intimate details about her life as a person with disabilities we end by meeting another disabled person whom Review readers have met before most recently in Just for Being Spring Summer 2000 13 year old Moy Moy who lives in India Moy Moy cannot speak for herself her mother Jo McGowan however speaks loud and clear about the beauty and the wonder of her child Singer doesn't know Moy Moy McGowan writes but what he ought to know about her is that in her young life she has already created a mini Empire of love compassion and previously unimagined good around her A sharp contrast I'd say to the evil empire Singer's Princeton chair rests on But McGowan doesn't rail against Singer instead in her beautifully original approach she asks him to consider something he may not have but I won't tell you what it is it's a delight to read it for yourself It's the kind of argument about nature like Condie's about biology in whieh what shines through is the lack of conflict with a theologically mandated respect for the sanctity of life How I wish McGowan's words could have the massive audience of the NY Times I have no room here to introduce our appendices but they are an exceptionally good series of columns and an article which give additional news and clear insights about current events involving our issues including a column about the United Nations and international adoption you might find surprising But I'd like to close by highlighting another victory we'll remember 2003 for both the Senate in March and the House in June passed the Partial Birth Abortion Ban We look forward to the day when President Bush will sign it into law it is now in committee to smooth out any conflicts in the two versions and we insist on hoping to report more protection for and awareness of the rights of the unborn in our next issue Once more we thank Nick Downes for his gift of the relief of a good chuckle now and then Until next time MARIAMcFADDEN EDITOR 6 SPRING 2003

SCHEIDLER’S SUPREME VICTORY

Scheidler9 Supreme Victory Stephen Vincent Pro life action news Mark Wednesday Feb 26 in red letters because it is one big red letter day for the pro life movement We were having a slice ofcherry pie for breakfast when we got word that the U S Supreme Court had ruled 8 to 1 that we are not racketeers With these words Joseph M Scheidler announced victory over the National Organization for Women and other pro abortion forces in a case that had lasted 17 years and come to symbolize the struggle between the culture of life and the culture of death Hanging in the balance was nothing less than the good name of the pro life movement Scheidler and his Pro Life Action League are now using the victory to infuse new energy into the movement against abortion The decision written by Chief Justice William H Rehnquist not only vindicates the peaceful protests of pro lifers who pray counsel or picket outside clinics It also protects social protestors and civil rights activists of all stripes from crippling lawsuits brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations RICO act Recognizing the threat the case posed to practitioners of all sorts of civil disobedience a number of organizations that are far from being pro life filed amicus briefs on Scheidler's side The day after the decision a Chicago Tribune editorial described it as a victory for free speech Conscious of its image as a champion of free speech and civil rights NOW long ago posted a Q A about the case on its website to appease liberal supporters The lead leading question says it all Are Scheidler's protests like those of the Civil Rights movement or the Ku Klux Klan With such rhetoric hurled at him Scheidler was proud to state after the Court's decision It's nice to know the First Amendment is still in force even for pro lifers in this country Colorful quotable and irrepressible Joe is known among his supporters as the grandfather of the pro life movement Yet to NOW and other proabortion forces he is not a grandfather but a godfather mobster in the mold of fellow Chicagoan AI Capone NOW brought civil charges of extortion under RICO and used images of Scheidler sporting his signature black hat Stephellll Vincellllt writes from Wallingford Connecticut SPRING 200317

STEPHEN VINCENT and bullhorn to back up the portrayal of him as an anti choice gangster NOW also presented spurious testimony to associate Scheidler with every act of violence ever committed against an abortion clinic or an abortionist This journal has covered the case extensively with a forum on the use of RICO in Summer 1998 and a study of the questionable testimony in Fall 2000 Scheidler never let his opponents stop him although every aspect of his personal and professional life w s placed under a microscope and he was threatened with bankruptcy His suburban Chicago house was placed in escrow to enable him to post a 440,000 bond while appealing a lower court judgment Throughout the legal ordeal that began in 1986 he was active at the clinics counseling praying and persuading women to turn away from abortion He even played with the mobster image continuing to wear his black hat and introducing himself at rallies as a racketeer for life In November 2002 with oral arguments before the Supreme Court scheduled for December a time when most appellants would shy away from controversial actions Scheidler was making waves in the media and abortion capital of New York helping to launch a campaign in which pro lifers hold up posters of aborted babies in high traffic areas It was more than simply and literally an in your face tactic Scheidler wanted to dramatize his belief that the charges against him amounted to a phantom case that could not be taken seriously The case didn't slow us down he reflected a few days after his Supreme victory I would say that it pepped us up We didn't know how much time we had before we would be shut down by the courts We always knew though whether it's by us or someone else the battle goes on because it's right The biggest problem he continued was hiring people for our ProLife Action League operations because we couldn't guarantee that we'd still be in business the following year They tried to make me out as the man running all these pro life operations nationwide It was very flattering but it just wasn't true In a victory letter to friends and supporters addressed to Dear Fellow Former Racketeers he stated As much as I have enjoyed being known as a racketeer I am now happy to have been vindicated One of his regular action news updates phone hot line messages that he's been composing since 1974 put the Court's decision in perspective Abortion will end one day just as surely as the day came when slavery was outlawed Pro life attorneys think this Supreme Court victory will open new action against other unconstitutional restrictions on pro life activities 8 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW The court must recognize that it is unconstitutional to have special laws against people who disagree with abortion He cited as examples the federal Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances FACE Act passed during the Clinton years and the bubble zones imposed by local governments that keep even people who are only praying away from clinic doors 1l'lhlie lHIaIlJl idl oft Goidl A former Benedictine who left religious life before final vows because I wasn't cut out for obedience Scheidler attributes victory ultimately to God 1 saw and experienced directly the power of concerted and persistent prayer he said 1 knew without a doubt that God has His hand in this victory Thomas Brejcha lead counsel for Scheidler's side also assessed the outcome in very unlawyerlike terms We got not a single vote in the Chicago Court of Appeals and we get an 8 1 decision from the Supreme Court he marveled It's a remarkable a miraculous turnaround The case was full of ironic twists Anyone familiar with the pro life movement knows that far from having centralized control and powerful bosses pro life groups are often hampered by their inability to unite Yet NOW in a sense produced what it condemned It raised Scheidler to the status of head man in legal proceedings and persuaded other pro lifers to rally around him As Joe goes so goes the movement many began to think Not all to be sure In 1999 federal appeals judge David Coar slapped Scheidler and the other defendants Andrew Scholberg and Timothy Murphy with a nationwide injunction With the loose wording of this injunction anyone working with Scheidler or adopting the methods outlined in his book Closed 99 Ways to Stop Abortion could have been touched by it Many prolifers shied away for fear of later being collared as cooperators in Scheidler's network But enough others came to Scheidler's side including brave donors who helped him pay his mounting legal fees Pro life leaders who had stood by him from the start were quick to applaud his victory This litigation was clearly an attempt by NOW to eliminate pro life voices from the public square said Dennis M Burke staff counsel for Americans United for Life also based in Chicago Judie Brown of American Life League called Scheidler a good friend who has fought valiantly for years This decision is a tremendous victory for those who engage in social protests said Jay Sekulow chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice which filed a brief for Operation Rescue A related case Operation Rescue v NOW was included in the decision although Operation Rescue has effectively been out of business for years The ruling clearly SPRING 2003 9

STEPHEN VINCENT shuts the door on using RICO against the pro life movement Abortion is not just a legal procedure To groups like NOW it is a sacred ritual said Father Frank Pavone of Priests for Life Their efforts have hit the brick wall of our nation's sacred right of protest Long live that right Francis Cardinal George ofChicago who led a prayer vigil with Scheidler's group outside a Planned Parenthood facility shortly after the decision stated If the courts had been used to stop organized sit ins at lunch counters in the Sixties there would have been no civil rights movement Columnist John Leo pointed out that the American Civil Liberties Union had opposed the passage of RICO from the start but they didn't fight it when it was used against pro lifers Editorials in conservative and liberal papers alike applauded the decision The Wall Street Journal said it upholds the right of all Americans left or right to protest under the First Amendment The Chicago Tribune stated No matter where they stand individually on the divisive issue of abortion all Americans should applaud There were 74 amicus briefs filed by groups ranging from labor organizations to tree hugging environmentalists to nuclear weapons protestors to the Seamless Garment Network Also joining were high profile Catholics more commonly associated with other issues Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois founder of the School of the Americas Watch death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan and Martin Sheen known to millions as the President on The West Wing Craig M Bradley who wrote the brief for PETA summed the issue up nicely Scheidler Company wanted to shut the abortion clinics down They didn't want to take them over Just like PETA protestors might want to shut down an animal rendering plant not take it over The High Court agreed Obtaining a DecisioJl1l In the end the 17 year case that made two trips to the Supreme Court was shockingly simple To violate RICO one must commit a series of specified acts or conspire to commit these acts Scheidler and his colleagues admitted that they had broken the law though only laws against trespassing and related minor offenses which don't qualify under RICO and that they did so in concert with others with the express intent of shutting down abortion clinics NOW claimed that by depriving or attempting to deprive clinics of their right to do business Scheidler et al were engaged in extortion one of the criminal acts specified by RICO The court stated But even when their acts of interference and disruption la SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW achieved their ultimate goal of shutting down a clinic that performed abortions such acts did not constitute extortion because petitioners did not obtain respondents property They may have deprived or sought to deprive respondents of their alleged property right of exclusive control of their business assets but they did not acquire any such property Petitioners neither pursued nor received something of value from respondents that they could exercise transfer or sell The court concluded that Scheidler's tactics more nearly constituted coercion a lesser crime not covered by RICO If the distinction between extortion and coercion which we find controls these cases is to be abandoned such a significant expansion of the law's coverage must come from Congress and not from the courts The implications of the case of course go beyond semantic distinctions Although Scheidler was barred from raising a First Amendment defense and NOW tried to narrow the case to anti abortion activism alone Scheidler's legal team succeeded in portraying pro life protestors as being in the mainstream of civil disobedience During oral arguments some justices raised the First Amendment themselves wondering aloud whether the right to free expression would not be violated by a wide application of RICO When we heard these statements in defense of our position we were thinking that maybe we could win this thing Scheidler recalls Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Steven Breyer joined the majority with their own concurring opinion They noted the chilling effect that NOW's application of RICO could have on all social protest while at the same time keeping their pro abortion credentials in order In the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act of 1994 Congress crafted a statutory response that homes in on the problem of criminal activity at health care facilities Thus the principal effect of a decision against petitioners here would have been on other cases pursued under RICO In other words since we can get pro lifers on FACE why risk weakening PETA NOW attacked this position in its rants after the decision We will work to ensure that the FACE act is enforced But that is not enough read a press release FACE is too limited and doesn't reach the organizers of the violence We are looking at every avenue available to us to protect women doctors and clinic staff from these ideological terrorists Mood wHrrng In 1994 the Supreme Court allowed the proceedings against Scheidler to continue by ruling 9 0 that he did not need to have an economic motive to be accused under RICO Why did the court now rule 8 1 in his favor The SPRING 2003 11

STEPHEN VINCENT technical explanation is that a slightly different legal point was under consideration the larger implication is that the mood of the court and the nation has shifted slightly toward life America I believe is on the brink of a new appreciation for the value of human life especially unborn human life Scheidler said We are on the cutting edge of a subtle but very clear shift in our attitudes Characteristically Scheidler's victory celebration in June was not only for pro life advocates but for all Americans Joe is a patriot who loves his country and the freedoms proclaimed and protected by the Constitution There were U S flags as well as prayers at his rally to Bring America Back to Life Alongside Scheidler's populism NOW and its sister organizations come off as angry and anti American The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League showed a certain Brave New World arrogance in changing its name to NARAL Pro Choice America With polls showing increasing numbers of citizens opposing abortion on demand and more young people coming out against killing unborn babies at any stage NARAL thinks that by proclaiming America to be pro choice it can make it so Yet the liberal tower of choice constructed in the Seventies is beginning to totter as the support base ages and thins Try as they may to refashion themselves according to the findings of Madison Avenue focus groups the fact is that the pro abortion forces are increasingly outsiders whose language and tactics do not resonate with most Americans A NOW leader's argument against bringing double murder charges to include Laci Peterson's unborn baby is a perfect example ofhow NOW style rhetoric has confounded common sense and left pro abortion forces talking mostly among themselves It is far too soon to sound the death knell of the abortion mindset Yet it may be time to define a new category of American malcontent that has yet to be recognized by the mainstream media To go with the angry white male we now have the angry white female The poster girl hands down would be Fay Clayton NOW's lead lawyer She demonstrated her graciousness on The O'Reilly Factor after the decision She attacked Scheidler and repeatedly cut off Bill O'Reilly saying in a dozen different ways that the decision was really not a defeat that NOW is really not finished and that FACE gives abortion forces all the power they need to keep anti choicers at bay Huff and puff as she may the Supreme Court decision speaks for itself The name of the case itself symbolically marks a change in momentum Though usually called by its original name NOWv Scheidler the case heard by the Supreme Court was in fact the appellate version Scheidler v NOW The tables have been turned on the pro abortion movement They've gone from bringing suit to defending 12 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW The future looks bright Against Roe and its progeny come Scheidler and his seven children and so far 10 granClchildren Two of his children Eric 36 and Annie 26 work full time for the Pro Life Action League And they are NOW's worst nightmare educated energetic erudite and fully as determined as their dad Eric whose wife recently delivered their sixth child handles communications and the web Annie heads Generations for Life which educates and mobilizes young people on abortion and a range of other issues including chastity Such a complete victory in answer to so many prayers is a tremendous encouragement to our peaceful pro life activism Eric Scheidler writes NOW's long effort to thwart our pro life work has never stopped us from saving babies and helping women but now we are prepared to redouble those efforts I lL 1 ACfll fJ y 1 OUFl S to lCI t FLlS t s Jl M 14 oS oS7 Lue GAQ snl1 L NC WEillV 1 SSlli cO ol'U r OOD PoIS I lI G 6 CoiWts'G S l1P 1,1 RU Stt S on Ill'Y 1 CJ O ia SPRING 2003 13

CLONING, STEM CELLS, AND RELIGION

Cloning Stem Cells andl Religion William Murchison The topic was religious journalism ins and outs sins and doubts basically the stuff that century journalists may expect to encounter as they report and interpret the faith quests that modern society finds so engaging Well let's see lots of stuff goes on out there There's school prayer churchstate separation faith based initiatives Jerry Falwell the Islamic upsurge religious pluralism stem cell research and cloning Stop right there Cloning and stem cells Cloning stem cells and religion Could that be described as a stretch of sorts the importation of God into discussions of how to alleviate disease and suffering Teacher's call My call specifically as the teacher My university journalism class Religion and the Media stood in need of understanding so far as I had the means of helping the students understand the various religious implications involved in stem cell research and cloning There was some logic here We had talked already about abortion and not just about religious leadership in the pro life cause rather about the grounds for religious involvement in the matter Those grounds seemed straightforward enough The pagan culture that preceded Christianity had taken a low or at best indifferent view of human life as such There was to be no equating noble lives and marginal or worthless ones This essentially utilitarian view the Church had labored successfully to overthrow Life was the gift of God said the Church All who tenanted the human body and put their faith in God's Only Begotten Son Jesus Christ would not perish Everlasting life would be theirs It was an extraordinary promise that rendered impossible and unthinkable such pagan norms and practices as tyranny and in a still more painful and concrete sense the exposing of defective infants on hillsides The astonishing new teacbing about life entered into Christianity's fiber From teaching flowed practice the creation of alms houses hospitals and foundling homes acts of private mercy in forms as innumerable as the donors and the recipients prayer and supplication for those in need pain or both Ultimately the modern notion of democracy coupled with that of human brotherhood came to rest upon the Church's affirmation of the moral equality ofhuman lives Brotherhood democracythese are not such notions as the world is likely to renounce Violate yes Renounce no William Murchison is Radford Distinguished Professor of Journalism at Baylor University 14 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Among the violations governmentally enforced tolerance of abortion Yet here too the Christian community has weighed in powerfully The pro life cause the cause of opposition to abortion as well as euthanasia survives and flourishes on almost exclusively Christian principles Secular prolifers ofthe Nat Hentoff stamp are rare phenomena Not so pregnancy hotlines and adoption agencies run by churches or rosaries and Rome collars at prolife rallies and demonstrations The religious connection with life questions is on one plane inevitable on another at least understandable to those unconvinced of such a connection But then there was cloning and there was stem cell research The matter twin concerns essentially had a different feel No a different look that was it The look was of well scrubbed laboratories gleaming test tubes and starched white jackets We knew that look surely the look of Science In these labs amid these test tubes something was going on for the betterment of mankind Where did religion come into the matter And supposing it did come in what might it have to say That the Betterment of Humanity was less urgent than some ancient theological quibble That was what I thought we might do well to discuss in our class And so it came about I have no evocative reports on the discussion which was relatively straightforward Cloning was a news story cloning had a decided religious dimension this dimension was going to become increasingly inconvenient for the proponents journalists assigned to cover cloning were going to have to understand what religious objections might arise to the manipulation of biology for the presumed advancement of bios So there Professorial power is a matter to which I am happily adjusting having joined myself to academia just in the past year after a lifetime in journalism The 21st century is notably uncomfortable with religious questions as they find their way into public discourse Such is the legacy of religious pluralism about which we also talked in class The consequences of the school prayer debate work themselves into our arguments over human life questions Among those consequences the widespread feeling that differences among religions not to say differences between religious and secular viewpoints preclude much of a role for religion in the formation of government policy Quite a few religious peopleespecially those who head mainline religious denominations seem proud to adopt this viewpoint Adopting it seems to feed their sense of social integrity It is as if they were saying Yes we too are tolerant Yes we have convictions dogmas creeds beliefs We know we must work not to impose these on society at large at vast cost to the social peace and to our own understanding of obligation in a pluralistic society SPRING 2003 15

WILLIA M MURCHISON The late Allan Bloom noted the phenomenon a decade and a half ago in The Closing ofthe American Mind If everything is opinion nothing is true Diciest of all viewpoints to assert may be those that proceed allegedly and who is to answer for the quality of stenographic work in the First Century A D from a supernatural presence not even Bill O'Reilly can snag for an interview I set these considerations on the record merely by way of suggesting the problems that attend introduction of theology into the debate over stem cell research and the cloning of human beings These are profoundly theological problems Yet in considering them society is inclined to wave off the theologians who bring to bear their insights into the matter The exclusion of theology throws us back on the supposed science of ethics especially bioethics as we call this newest speciality in an already complex field The matter has not yet descended to Benthamite calculation the greatest good for the greatest number But precedents especially with regard to abortion are not encouraging The settled judicial policy concerning abortion is that abortion is good if you think it's good and if you happen to think it isn't good why then as the bumper sti ker enjoins Don't Have One The question of life as a religious concern emerges just as strongly in the context of stem cell research cloning as in that of abortion A wacky side to the matter has emerged already On Dec 26 2002 according to a French company calling itself Clonaid the cloning of a baby girl called Eve took place Young Eve is said to be an exact genetic copy of her mother a 31year old American woman Oh and it gets better Clonaid is owned by a sect called the Raelians who claim that life on earth is the handiwork of space aliens called the Elohim who in 1973 revealed this thitherto overlooked morsel to a French race car driver now calling himself not coincidentally Rael Rael weeks later informed a Washington Post reporter that the production ofteenage clones will soon become a reality lacking memory and personality true but only until technology uncovers a way to download these commodities As my juniors and sophomores might say in various other contexts Whatever A provocative datum in the discussion is that the Rae1ians have declined to make Eve available for testing I get the wackiness out of the way early so as to proceed to the serious Religious perspectives indeed inform the the sporadic public debate on cloning You just don't hear that much about them that's all America some years ago turned down its hearing aid when the talk turned to public matters and their relationship to religion Cloning affords the opportunity indeed the duty to turn up the volume And cloning means That would seem a useful matter for clarification Here is the definition of the President's 16 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Council on Bioethics A form of reproduction in which offspring result not from the chance union of egg and sperm sexual reproduction but from the deliberate reproduction of the genetic makeup of another single individual asexual reproduction To achieve this you introduce the nuclear material of a human somatic cell donor into an oocyte egg whose own nucleus has been removed or inactivated yielding a product that has a human genetic constitution virtually identical to the donor of the somatic cell You would do this fundamentally for two reasons to produce a child who will be genetically virtually identical to a currently existing or previously existing individual or for the proximate purpose of using a cloned human embryo in research or for extracting its stem cells with the ultimate goals of gaining scientific knowledge of normal and abnormal development and of developing cures for human diseases That will get us started Where from here To consideration of the religious consensus in the matter The first thing we discover is that consensus is not the operative word If a con word is what we are seeking concern will do the job There is religious concern about cloning and stemcell research just as there is concern about abortion Concern fails notoriously these days to translate into principled opposition This is probably not to wonder at As the English would say these are early days in the cloning debate A debate that is conditioned to no small degree on what we as a society already have decided about abortion Abortion we seem to have decided is a close call It is not of course a close call but close calling a policy means obviating the need to think about and especially to look at it closely and still more to exempt opponents to whom we may be closely related from blame or censure That is one reason for calling abortion a close call If people think that of abortion which condemns to death recognizably human forms unborn babies fetuses take your pick anything but products of conception all the more so must many view cloning for medical research This thing this egg why you can't even see it except with a powerful microscope That is less certainly than may be said of a developing fetus with its differentiated limbs and occasional jerks of activity Yet that fertilized egg in the mythology of cloning has purpose Might stem cells rightly employed lead researchers to cell based therapies for Parkinson's and diabetes If so would not that constitute a major scientific gain Similarly might we not figure out ways for use of the cells in the screening of new drugs and toxins and in learning more about birth defects That would be a social gain Yes Yes SPRING 2003 17

WILLIAM MURCHISON A mother wishing merely separation from an unwanted product of conception can be accused of selfishness and indifference even with journalists and feminist mouthpieces to the extent there's any difference ready to step in refocusing the question on the mother's right to enjoyment of her privacy An embryo though ready at the touch of Science to yield knowledge about the causes of Michael J Fox's Parkinson's and Christopher Reeve's immobility that would seem to many a different matter How so Because medical progress supposedly is going on Health is being restored Here too we have life questions medicine health the extension in many cases of life itself Yes God is the author of life He would nod His head approvingly assuming ala Michelangelo He has a head to nod at the prospect of His creatures finding the clues He has scattered about for them using those clues to enter more deeply into the mysteries of creation I must acknowledge that I have not heard a theologian put it exactly that way but I would expect to once this essentially new debate is more fully joined Theologians are not much different from non theologians in their capacity for discovering that God happens to see things just the way they do themselves The difficulty with this viewpoint involves squaring it with another human capacity for stark terror And just how does terror come into it The alleviation of suffering is about joy and bliss and peace and contentment Isn't it It would seem to depend Done the right way the alleviation of suffering brings anticipated pleasures Done the wrong way The wrong way There could be a wrong way The ethical theological question ofmeans and ends begins to spread open its wings We start to see things Not necessarily the awful things we might have expected The Frankenstein movies have equipped us to anticipate the moment when science steps in as creator not necessarily displacing the original Creator but as the gangster movies used to have it muscling in on His racket Opposition to cloning to produce children is practically unanimous in America writes Dr Leon Kass chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics The vast majority of Americans oppose it Most research scientists agree that it should be banned Nearly every member of Congress has condemned it Cloning not only carries high risks of bodily harm to the cloned child but it also threatens the dignity of human procreation giving one generation unprecedented genetic control over the next It is the first step in a eugenic world in which children become objects of manipulation and products of wil1 Little Boris Karloffs with bolts in their brains That would be one way of putting it We are not there It might be easier if we were A hulk with stiff arms and bolts in the brain is apt to have a clarifying effect on its beholders This is 18 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW not life It walks it stalks it breathes but walking stalking and breathing are not the essence of life We know instinctively as one movie title had it that Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed That does not take care of the ethical theological question with respect as to cloning even if as Kass notes with satisfaction hardly anybody out there wants to clone kids Between Boris Karloff and Michael J Fox some spacious territory lies not just in cinematic terms either Afflicted like Pope John Paul n and many others with Parkinson's Disease Michael J Fox star of movies and television sees embryonic stem cell research as a hopeful means of addressing his plight His foundation and that of Christopher Reeve paralyzed in a riding accident promote stem cell research as a manifestly good work Scientists as we are regularly informed see such research as affecting cures not just for Parkinson's and paralysis but also for diabetes Alzheimer's heart disease and cancer What is to stop us all that being so A strong minority last year on the President's Council on Bioethics argued that moral objections to cloning for medical research are outweighed by the great good that may come from it that embryos marked for destruction would serve a great good and this should not be obscured This was insufficient to override the objections of the council majority which hoped in all our names that we would leave our children a world that honors moral limits that respects all life whether strong or weak and that refuses to secure the good of some human beings by sacrificing the lives of others Kass in a subsequent article for the New York Times would contend that the production of cloned embryos for any purpose is a significant leap in transforming procreation into a form of manufacture Slaying yes to cloned embryos even for research means saying yes at least in principle to an ever expanding genetic mastery of one generation over the next Once cloned embryos exist in laboratories the eugenic revolution will have begun A crucial moral boundary will have been crossed One more intuition deserves to be recorded that when the boundary in question is crossed mass rejoicings may out This could be the thing for which millions have waited the chance to re engineer humanity finally getting this life thing right Goodbye to pain and suffering Goodbye to mortality What holds that moment at bay Right now ethical considerations of the sort explored by Leon Kass Sometimes those considerations are embodied in law sometimes not The U S House of Representatives voted in February 2003 to prohibit all forms of human cloning the Senate as of this writing had yet to act SPRING 2003 19

WILLIAM MURCHISON Clearly the ethics of the matter are urgent More urgent still is the theology The latter point is the one we should get fixed firmly in mind because on cloning ethics is divided against itself on one side the Leon Kasses on the other the Michael 1 Foxes The Kasses look into the future asking what if The Foxes talk about now saying why not The Kass commission minority stated its case straightforwardly There is a moral case for research cloning it rests on our obligation to try to relieve human suffering it may offer uniquely useful ways of investigating and possibly treating many chronic debilitating diseases and disabilities providing aid and relief to millions We also believe that the moral objections to this research are outweighed by the great good that may come from it Even council members who entertain moral concerns about research cloning overcome these concerns by reasoning that embryos created for research would not be created for destruction but for use in the service of life and medicine They would be destroyed in the service of a great good A great good According to whom Not according to Leon Kass certainly or to the majority of the bioethics council But so it goes in ethics the conflict of perceived good against perceived good Who does the perceiving or does it most convincingly generally tells the tale Ethics in the end valuable as are its insights may not be able to hold the ramparts forever against cloning Its insights are prospective and theoretical the sufferings of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's victims are here andnow and what is more they have the power to draw tears and change hearts That the claims of certain success from experimental cloning may be over stated is a point not easy to prove Look meantime at doughty Christopher Reeve Don't we hope he may walk again The moment is ripe for the theologians and the need is correspondingly great Not all will rise to the occasion or wish to But there is clearly a good deal to say and the field should not be left to His Holiness Rael as he insists on others calling him The theologians will differ as indeed they do over abortion and everything else But God's appearance in the debate should neither startle nor dismay even when His spokespeople differ among themselves The abortion stalemate misgivings as well as certainties on both sides neither able to sweep the other off the field reminds us of the power of theological argument Yes the theologians assume differing postures in the matter yet theology alone the theology of God as Creator of life keeps the pro life cause intellectually and financially solvent Without priests and preachers engaging God in the debate Planned Parenthood and the National 20 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Organization for Women might long ago have triumphed talking as did the bioethics council minority about destruction in the service of a greater good A good defined naturally by themselves Theology has never occupied a lower place at the American table than the one into which it was thrust at the start of the age of pluralism Does that argue against the flexing of theological muscle It would seem to argue for the reverse that is for sturdy and prolonged meditation on the fearful implications of creating life When the theologians fall quiet about matters of great moment the secular society doesn't assume they are being good little American citizens It assumes they have nothing to say Nothing to say Nothing to offer concerning human life its origins and purposes Who in that case is to do the talking Among others journalists will be delighted to from the cable news studios to the paneled editorial suites The Eve we will hear about is not the one found in Genesis 2 4 she is the Raelians Eve or another like her a hot journalistic property for sure matter for books Larry King interviews and TV movies That is how pluralism and theogical daintiness post Roe v Wade work in American life The sight is neither pleasant nor hopeful That's one angry mime SPRING 2003121

LIFE:DEFINING THE BEGINNING BY THE END

Life Derming the Beginning by the End Maureen L Condie What defines the beginning of human life This question has been the topic of considerable legal and social debate over the years since the Supreme Court's Roe v Wade decision debate that has only been intensified by the recent controversies over human embryonic stem cells and human cloning Answers to this question run the full gamut from those who argue that life begins at conception the view of more than one major world religion to those arguing that babies are not to be considered fully human until a month after birth the position of Princeton Professor of Bioethics Peter Singer The range of dissent and disagreement on the question of when human life begins has led many to believe it cannot be reasonably resolved in a pluralistic society Courts have ruled that the diversity of opinion on the topic precludes a judicial resolution requiring instead that the matter be addressed in the political arena where accommodation of divergent views can be wrought through debate and compromise Many Americans appear equally unwilling to impose a single interpretation on society preferring instead to allow decisions regarding the beginning of life to be largely a matter of personal choice While reluctance to impose a personal view on others is deeply ingrained in American society one must question the legitimacy of such reluctance when the topic of our imposition is a matter quite literally of life and death Few beyond the irrationally obdurate would maintain that human embryos are anything other than biologically Homo sapiens and alive even at the earliest developmental stages Equally few would contest the fact that at early stages of embryonic development human embryos bear little resemblance to anything we easily identify as human For most people reconciling these two facts involves the uncon llortably fuzzy process of drawing a line somewhere during the continuously changing process ofhuman prenatal development and asserting There That's when human life beginsat least for me It is precisely the subjectivity and inaccuracy ofthis decision that fuels our discomfort at imposing it on others In contrast to the widespread disagreement over when human life begins there is a broad social and legal consensus regarding when human life ends Maureen L Condie is an Assistant Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah currently conducting research on the regeneration of embryonic and adult neurons following spinal cord injury This essay originally appeared in First Things and is reprinted with permission Copyright c 2003 First Things 133 May 2003 22 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW Rarely has the point been made that the definition of human death can be applied to the question of when life commences with compelling symmetry The definition of when life ends is both scientific and objective and does not depend on personal belief or moral viewpoint The current medical and legal understanding of death unambiguously defines both when human life ends and when it begins in a manner that is widely accepted and consistent with the legal and moral status of human beings at all stages of life Death is something most people readily recognize when they see it People express very little confusion about the difference between a living person and a corpse Surprisingly however the distinction is not as clear from a medical and scientific perspective There is very little biologic difference between a living person in the instant before death and the body of that person an instant after death Yet some property has clearly departed from the body in death and that property is precisely the element that defines human life What then is the difference between live persons and dead ones How is death defined medically and scientifically The question of when and under precisely what conditions people are viewed as dead has itself been the subject of considerable debate Traditionally the medical profession considered a person dead when his heart stopped beating a condition that rapidly results in the death of the cells of the body due to loss of blood flow As the life saving potential of organ transplants became increasingly apparent in the 1960s the medical community undertook a reexamination of the medical standards for death Waiting until the heart stops beating results in considerable damage to otherwise transplantable organs After a long and contentious debate a new standard of death was proposed in 1968 that defined brain death as the critical difference between living persons and corpses a standard that is now widely although not universally accepted throughout the world Brain death occurs when there has been irreversible damage to the brain resulting in a complete and permanent failure of brain function Following the death of the brain the person stops thinking sensing moving breathing or performing any other function although many of the cells in the brain remain alive following loss of brain function The heart can continue to beat spontaneously for some time following death of the brain even hearts that have been entirely removed from the body will continue to beat for a surprisingly long period but eventually the heart ceases to function due to loss ofoxygen The advantage ofbrain death as a legal and medical definition for the end of life is that the quality of organs for transplant can be maintained by maintaining artificial respiration So long as oxygen is artificially supplied the heart will continue to beat and the other organs of the body will be SPRING 2003123

MAU EN L CONDIe maintained in the same state they were prior to death of the brain Defining death as the irreversible loss ofbrain function remains for some a controversial decision The fact that the cells and organs of the body can be maintained after the death of the individual is a disturbing concept The feeling that corpses are being kept artificially alive as medical zombies for the convenient culture oftransplantable organs can be quite discomforting especially when the body in question is that of a loved one Nonetheless it is important to realize that this state of affairs is essentially no different from what occurs naturally following death by any means On a cellular and molecular level nothing changes in the instant of death Immediately following death most of the cells in the body are still alive and for a time at least they continue to function normally Maintaining heartbeat and artificial respiration simply extends this period of time Once the plug is pulled and the corpse is left to its own devices the cells and organs of the body undergo the same slow death by oxygen deprivation they would have experienced had medical science not intervened What has been lost at death is not merely the activity of the brain or the heart but more importantly the ability of the body's parts organs and cells to function together as an integrated whole Failure of a critical organ results in the breakdown of the body's overall coordinated activity despite the continued normal function or life of other organs Although cells of the brain are still alive following brain death they cease to work together in a coordinated manner to function as a brain should Because the brain is not directing the lungs to contract the heart is deprived of oxygen and stops beating Subsequently all of the organs that are dependent on the heart for blood flow cease to function as well The order of events can vary considerably the heart can cease to function resulting in death of the brain for example but the net effect is the same Death occurs when the body ceases to act in a coordinated manner to support the continued healthy function of all bodily organs Cellular life may continue for some time following the loss of integrated bodily function but once the ability to act in a coordinated manner has been lost life cannot be restored to a corpse no matter how alive the cells composing the body may yet be lt is often asserted that the relevant feature of brain death is not the loss of integrated bodily function but rather the loss of higher order brain activities including consciousness However this view does not reflect the current legal understanding of death The inadequacy of equating death with the loss of cognitive function can be seen by considering the difference between brain death and persistent vegetative state or irreversible coma Individuals who have entered a persistent vegetative state due to injury or disease have 24 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW lost all higher brain functions and are incapable of consciousness Nonetheless integrated bodily function is maintained in these patients due to the continued activity oflower order brain centers Although such patients are clearly in a lamentable medical state they are also clearly alive converting such patients into corpses requires some form of euthanasia Despite considerable pressure from the medical community to define persistent vegetative state as a type of brain death a definition that would both expand the pool of organ donors and eliminate the high medical costs associated with maintaining people in this condition the courts have repeatedly refused to support persistent vegetative state as a legal definition of death People whose bodies continue to function in an integrated manner are legally and medically alive despite their limited or absent mental function Regardless of how one may view the desirability of maintaining patients in a persistent vegetative state this being an entirely distinct moral and legal question there is unanimous agreement that such patients are not yet corpses Even those who advocate the withdrawal of food and water from patients in persistent vegetative state couch their position in terms of the right to die fully acknowledging that such patients are indeed alive While the issues surrounding persistent vegetative state are both myriad and complex the import of this condition for understanding the relationship between mental function and death is clear the loss of integrated bodily function not the loss of higher mental ability is the defining legal characteristic of death What does the nature of death tell us about the nature of human life The medical and legal definition of death draws a clear distinction between living cells and living organisms Organisms are living beings composed of parts that have separate but mutually dependent functions While organisms are made of living cells living cells themselves do not necessarily constitute an organism The critical difference between a collection of cells and a living organism is the ability of an organism to act in a coordinated manner for the continued health and maintenance of the body as a whole It is precisely this ability that breaks down at the moment of death however death might occur Dead bodies may have plenty of live cells but their cells no longer function together in a coordinated manner We can take living organs and cells from dead people for transplant to patients without a breach of ethics precisely because corpses are no longer living human beings Human life is defined by the ability to function as an integrated whole not by the mere presence of living human cells What does the nature of death tell us about the beginning of human life SPRING 2003125

MAUREEN L CONDIe From the earliest stages of development human embryos clearly function as organisms Embryos are not merely collections of human cells but living creatures with all the properties that define any organism as distinct from a group of cells embryos are capable of growing maturing maintaining a physiologic balance between various organ systems adapting to changing circumstances and repairing injury Mere groups of human cells do nothing like this under any circumstances The embryo generates and organizes distinct tissues that function in a coordinated manner to maintain the continued growth and health of the developing body Even within the fertilized egg itself there are distinct parts that must work together specialized regions of cytoplasm that will give rise to unique derivatives once the fertilized egg divides into separate cells Embryos are in full possession of the very characteristic that distinguishes a living human being from a dead one the ability of all cells in the body to function together as an organism with all parts acting in an integrated manner for the continued life and health of the body as a whole Linking human status to the nature of developing embryos is neither subjective nor open to personal opinion Human embryos are living human beings precisely because they possess the single defining feature of human life that is lost in the moment ofdeath the ability to function as a coordinated organism rather than merely as a group of living human cells What are the advantages of defining the beginning of human life in the same manner that we define its end based on the integrated organismal function ofhuman beings To address this question the alternative arguments regarding when life begins must be briefly considered While at first inspection there appear to be many divergent opinions regarding when human life commences the common arguments are only of three general types arguments from form arguments from ability and arguments from preference The subjective and arbitrary nature of these arguments stands in stark contrast to the objective and unambiguous definition that organismal function provides for both the beginning and end of human life Of all the arguments regarding when human life begins the most basic and perhaps most intuitive is that to be human one must look human Early human embryos are often described as merely a ball of cells and for many it is difficult to imagine that something that looks more like a bag of marbles than a baby could possibly be a human being Fundamentally this argument asserts that human life is worthy of respect depending on appearance When plainly stated this conclusion is quite disturbing and also quite problematic What level of malformation are we willing to accept before we revoke the 26 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW right to continued existence How are we to view children whose mature form will not be completely manifest until puberty Form alone is a profoundly trivial and capricious basis for assigning human worth and one that cannot be applied without considerable and obvious injustice The superficiality of equating worth with form is sufficient for most to reject this argument and retreat to a functional definition form per se is not the issue rather it is the ability to function as a human being that defines the beginning ofhuman life Human beings are capable of a number ofdistinctive functions self awareness reason language and so forth that are acquired gradually over prenatal life as development proceeds Therefore the argument goes human worth is also gradually acquired with early embryos being less human than more developed fetuses A number ofseemingly independent arguments regarding when life begins are in fact variations on this argument from ability Thus the proposal that human life begins when the fetus becomes viable or capable of surviving outside ofthe womb is a subset ofthe ability argument that gives conclusive weight to the suite of abilities required for survival independent ofthe mother Similarly the common argument that embryos are human when they are in the womb of the mother where they can develop into babies while embryos generated in the laboratory are not is also a variation on the ability argument that equates developmental ability with human life and worth While the argument from ability is less superficial than the argument from form alone it is no less problematic As noted above functional definitions have been repeatedly rejected as a legal basis for the definition of death in part due to their arbitrary nature One can certainly identify any number of elderly and disabled people who are less functionally adept than newborn infants and perhaps even late term fetuses While Western culture has a strong tradition of meritocracy providing greater economic and social rewards to those who demonstrate greater achievement basic human rights are not meted out according to performance Unless we are willing to assign personhood proportionate to ability young children for example might be only 20 percent human while people with myopia 95 percent the limited abilities of prenatal humans are irrelevant to their status as human beings The final and perhaps the most emotionally compelling argument for assigning human status to a developing embryo is the extent to which parents desire a child Yet the argument from being wanted which equates status as a human being with the desire of a second party who has the power to confer or deny that status essentially reduces the definition of a human being to a matter of preference You are human because I choose to view you that way The fact that human status can be positively conferred for wanted SPRING 2003127

MAUREEN L CONDIe embryos as well as denied for the unwanted illustrates the fundamental arbitrariness of this argument The preferences of individuals who possess the power to impose them on others are hardly a compelling basis for legislation on human life Despite the apparent diversity of views regarding when human life begins the common arguments thus reduce to three general classes form ability and preference all of which are highly subjective and impossible to reconcile with our current legal and moral view of postnatal human worth It is in fact the subjectivity and inconsistency of these views rather than their diversity that makes them so unsatisfying as a basis for legislation on human life Unlike other definitions understanding human life to be an intrinsic property ofhuman organisms does not require subjective judgments regarding quality oflife or relative worth Adefinition based on the organismal nature of human beings acknowledges that individuals with differing appearance ability and desirability are nonetheless equally human It is precisely the objective nature of such a definition compared to vague quality of life assessments that has made organismal function so compelling a basis for the legal definition of death Once the nature of human beings as organisms has been abandoned as the basis for assigning legal personhood it is difficult to propose an alternative definition that could not be used to deny humanity to virtually any ne Arguments that deny human status to embryos based on form ability or choice can be readily turned against adult humans who have imperfect form limited ability or who simply constitute an inconvenience to more powerful individuals or groups Indeed such arguments can be quite protean in their ability to deny rights to anyone not meeting an arbitrary criterion for humanity Abraham Lincoln made this very point regarding arguments based on form ability and choice that Were put forth in his day to justify the institution of slavery It is color then the lighter having the right to enslave the darker Take care By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet with a fairer skin than your own You do not mean color exactly You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks and therefore have the right to enslave them Take care again By this rule you are to be slave to the first man you meet with an intellect superior to your own But say you it is a question of interest and if you can make it your interest you have the right to enslave another Very well And if he can make it his interest he has the right to enslave you 28 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Postnatal humans run very little risk that embryos will someday organize politically to impose restrictions on the rights of the born However once society has accepted a particular justification for denying rights to one class of individuals the same justification can readily be applied to other classes by appealing to the simple argument Society has already detennined that form ability or preference defines human life and thereby restricts human rights Why should the same standard not be applied in this case In American society and jurisprudence arguments from accepted precedent carry great emotional and legal force Society must determine whether it is willing to accept the current subjective and arbitrary basis for determining the status of prenatal human beings as a legitimate precedent for future legislation on human rights Embryos are genetically unique human organisms fully possessing the integrated biologic function that defines human life at all stages of development continuing throughout adulthood until death The ability to act as an integrated whole is the only function that departs from our bodies in the moment of death and is therefore the defining characteristic of human life This definition does not depend on religious belief or subjective judgment From the landmark case of Karen Ann Quinlan 1976 on the courts have consistently upheld organismal function as the legal definition of human life Failure to apply the same standard that so clearly defines the end of human life to its beginning is both inconsistent and unwarranted The conclusion that human life is defined by integrated organismal function has wide reaching implications both political and moral While the public domain has limited authority to promote morality it does have both the power and the responsibility to prevent harm to individuals A consistent definition of what constitutes human life both at its beginning and at its end requires that current legislation dealing with prenatal human life be considered in light ofboth biological fact and accepted legal precedent regarding the definition of human life If current legislation enables and supports the killing of human beings based on a scientifically flawed understanding of human life laws can and should be revised Clearly such a revision would not be without political cost Yet allowing life or death decisions to be based on arbitrary or capricious definitions is also a course of action that is not without considerable social and moral cost SPRING 2003 29

ASSISTED-SUICIDE ACTIVISM: PATIENCE AND PLASTIC BAGS

Assisted Suicide Activism Patience and Plastic Bags Rita L Marker Weare nowhere near where we thought we would be That statement by Emory University Law 1chool Professor David Garrow epitomizes the sentiments of assisted suicide advocates In 1994 Oregon became the only place in the world with a law that specifically made assisted suicide a medical treatment 1 When it went into effect in 1997,2 assisted suicide activists expected a domino effect They were certain that within five years state after state would have similar laws on the books and that they would be well on their way to reaching their real goal legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide on demand 3 They were wrong Since passage of Oregon's law activists have been trying to extend assisted suicide tentacles beyond Oregon Additional initiative campaigns have been waged Court cases have been filed Legislative proposals have been introduced With each new effort these activists have sought and received financial backing from deep pocket donors Each time they have predicted victory Each time they have met with failure They have only a string of losses to show for their labors and for millions of dollars in expenditures Both frustration over these failures and a dogged determination to forge ahead were evident at two recent assisted suicide conferences But just how to proceed is becoming a matter of considerable debate within the ranks of the pro death lobby On one side are those who view past efforts as investments that should be used as building blocks for repeat attempts in target states This faction wants to continue to focus primarily on achieving victory through legislative and judicial channels On the other side are the movement's militants who want to defy or circumvent the law Conspiracy to Suppress We are here to commemorate the five year experiment in the State of Oregon and it has worked With that proclamation Estelle Rogers 4 executive director of the Washington D C based Death with Dignity National Center opened the Fifth Anniversary Forum Results of the Oregon Experiment The conference held in Portland Oregon on October 24 2002 Rita L Marker is a practicing attorney and executive director of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide 30 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW attracted about sixty assisted suicide advocates many of whom are the movement's most influential strategists and planners but are little known outside academic and professional circles Speakers at the conference praised Oregon's assisted suicide law over and over again pointing to official reports as evidence that the law is working flawlessly 5 At the same time however they expressed dismay that it had not been replicated throughout the country and gave various reasons One of the most bizarre explanations was advanced by Charles Baron a Professor of Law at Boston College Law School and Hemlock Society activist 6 who said Oregon's law has been more successful than any of us could have dreamed but that other states haven't embraced it because assisted suicide opponents have suppressed news ofthe law's success He didn't explain how this information blockade has been accomplished but Baron believes it exists and sees it as a conspiracy to keep other states from learning about Oregon's law thus preventing others from wanting what Oregon has He compared his perceived assisted suicide information blackout to slave owners actions and to modern day racist opposition to minority success The State of Virginia would give freed slaves six mules to pick up and leave he said because if other slaves saw those who were free they would want the same freedom for themselves Referring to instances when successful African Americans have experienced racism and bigotry Baron said that opponents of assisted suicide can't tolerate the successful living example of death with dignity in Oregon Like Baron conference speaker David Garrow also noted his disappointment that the expected bounce from the Oregon law has not materialized as he walked his audience through the good things and the bad things that have occurred during the last five years Among the good things was that implementation of the Oregon law had been tremendously successful since we haven't had any train wrecks He also explained that two U S Supreme Court losses have been almost universally depicted as an endorsement of state laws permitting assisted suicide That was a tremendous victory even though we lost unanimously Turning to the disappointments Garrow described the failure in 2000 to pass a voter initiative in Maine8 that was identical to the Oregon law He said the question of religion was vastly less visible in Maine than it had been in Oregon so one couldn't argue that those who opposed assisted suicide there were trying to impose their religious views on others He also noted that the opposition ran a vastly more professional campaign than it had in Oregon SPRING 2003 31

RiTA L MARKER Nonetheless he said Maine was a campaign we should not have lost State court rulings have also been disappointing I expected that we would win independent state constitutional arguments in state courts he said We lost in Florida9 and Alaska 1O two of the most liberal courts in the country second only to Montana Another bad thing was the failure to pass any measure at the state legislative level although progress was made in Hawaii in late 2002 when for the first time in any state an assisted suicide proposal made it out of committee to the full legislative body 11 To reach beyond Oregon it may be many more years than we had expected Garrow said The timeline is significantly longer that it was five years ago Since he considers prospects in the legislative arena to be dim he said that this issue will inevitably have to go back into a constitutional litigation trap If you're not able to win on a matter politically in order to face the issue you may have to have a constitutional case Garrow then proposed a bold move Suggesting a new angle for the next venture into the courts he described a case in which a doctor would risk a murder conviction by assisting a suicide or performing euthanasia Such an approach would require a patient with a classic hard case condition and a physician with appeal as one participant remarked Kevorkian put the wrong face on the issue The location for the case would be equally important and Garrow noted that Montana might fit the bill Montana has a wonderfully radically libertarian state supreme court If a willing physician and poster perfect patient can be found there it's possible that sooner rather than later Montana will be in the spotlight The makeup of the state's supreme court in combination with the Montana constitution's right to privacy provision could make Montana an important judicial battleground The state could also be the site of a legislative proposal or a voter initiative Recently assisted suicide activists have made a number of trips to Montana for organizational and informational meetings Eli Stutsman of Oregon Death with Dignity put by far the most positive spin on past losses He described the resources time and efforts that his organization and the Hemlock Society put into the failed 2000 Maine initiative campaign as an investment Although they didn't win he claimed they hadn't done any damage to the movement and had in fact built an organization that could be used in the future Similarly he depicted the 2002 Hawaii legislative defeat as only a temporary setback He explained that both states had been targeted for action ever since 1997 When research identified them as states with the greatest potential for passing 32 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Oregon type laws activists began planning preparing and organizing By the time Hawaii's governor a strong advocate of assisted suicide called for assistance Stutsman said We were spring loaded to help We delivered funding and resources and made multiple trips ourselves According to Stutsman Maine and Hawaii are still very hopeful states 12 Yet like other speakers Stutsman did not foresee immediate success He said his goal for ten years from now is that Oregon won't be known as the only state permitting assisted suicide but as the first state to have done so Speakers and participants at the Oregon conference were candid about barriers that stand in the way of public support for assisted suicide Among these are terminology lack of support from major medical associations and fear created by safeguards Terminology poses problems Assisted suicide activists know the power of words They are keenly aware of the fact that all social engineering is preceded by verbal engineering The names of most pro assisted suicide organizations are illustrative e g Compassion in Dying Death with Dignity National Association Caring Friends Oregon Death with Dignity etc Indeed at the January 2003 Hemlock Society conference officials announced that the organization was planning a name change that would reflect a softer image and therefore be more appealing to the public In addition to changes in organizational names the phrases assisted suicide and physician assisted suicide PAS are being phased out Since the word suicide conjures up negative public feelings activists are seeking to delete it Oregon Assistant Attorney General Stephen Bushong said he never refers to assisted suicide I use the term physician aid in dying or physician hastening death of a terminally ill person Aid in dying is currently the phrase of choice for many assisted suicide activists But it is not new Failed initiatives in Washington 1991 13 and California 1992 14 would have legalized aid in dying defined to include both euthanasia and assisted suicide Likewise a model law to permit lethal injections or a fatal overdose for children as young as six was called an aidin dying act 15 Apparently activists believe that the bad taste left from those failed ventures has faded sufficiently and they're banking on the fact that the resurrected label will convey a much needed gentle image Lack ofsupport from major medical associations With the exception of Oregon where the state medical association did not take a position during the 1994 campaign that legalized assisted suicide the American Medical Association AMA and state medical associations oppose assisted suicide SPRING 2003 33

RITA L MARKER Assisted suicide activists want desperately to change this since physician support or at least neutrality would greatly increase their prospects of success This is particularly true in state houses where legislators could use physician support as cover for a favorable vote on an assisted suicide measure We're not going to succeed where there is only a legislative route unless there is a large shift on the part of large medical associations said Garrow We must produce a major change of opinion within the medical profession Oregon presents a cautionary example There where the law has permitted assisted suicide for more than five years physician attitudes have changed According to Stutsman the majority of Oregon medical students now favor physician assisted suicide As physicians who practiced in Oregon prior to legal assisted suicide retire they will be replaced by those whose enti e professional careers have taken place in an environment where assisted suicide is viewed as just one more medical treatment Cultivation of young physicians and medical students is on the agenda outside of Oregon as well In response to a questioner who asked what could be done to get the American Medical Association to support assisted suicide Dr Timothy Quill suggested focusing on autonomy Quill is bestknown for his 1991 New England Journal ofMedicine article in which he described assisting the death of a patient after referring her to the Hemlock Society 16 He was also the lead physician plaintiff in one of the failed assisted suicide cases 17 Younger doctors are schooled in patient autonomy he said It's like you want it you get it So if the issue is framed as one of patient control medical students and young physicians can be activated Safeguards create fear Fear of abuse tops the list of concerns that create barriers to assisted suicide support According to Stutsman With this issue we lose women voters first because they're afraid of abuse To allay those fears drafters always include so called safeguards18 in any assisted suicide proposal However those very safeguards send a message that is problematic Dr Marcia Angell the formereditor in chief ftheNewEnglandJournal ofMedicine 19 told participants that support for physician assisted suicide is soft very skittish because people fear doctors And while the inclusion of safeguards in assisted suicide bills has been necessary to dispel fears the safeguards themselves actually feed those fears By adding safeguards it gives the public the impression that PAS is a very scary thing she said Assisting Suicide Isn't Rocket Science While most participants at the Portland gathering were focused on ways to gain physician support and to establish strategies for victory outside Oregon's boundaries a few did not want to confine activities to calm 34 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW methodical and possibly slow progress Hemlock's Faye Girsh20 took speakers to task for what she obviously viewed as unreasonable caution and she suggested another model This isn't rocket science You don't need four years of medical school to assist someone's death Xn our Caring Friends program we're using techniques that don't require physician participation We've had four years of experience But Girsh's pitch for Caring Friends a Hemlock Society program that provides hands on death assistance was not well received Stutsman pointed out that if the goal is legal reform involvement of physicians is all important Xn order to get voter support physicians are necessary Angell said she didn't think doctors should be let offthe hook When they sign on to take care of a patient they should take care of the patient all the way through including assisting suicide Although Quill acknowledged that the technical part of ending a patient's life isn't difficult he said a doctor is necessary to diagnose the patient and to decide whether assisted suicide is the right thing at the right time Girsh strongly disagreed She insisted that people can be trained to make clinical assessments and that well trained volunteers can help people explore their options as well as help them end their lives with currently available non medical methods Support for the full speed ahead approach described by Girsh in Portland was readily apparent three months later at the 13th National Hemlock Biennial Conference held at San Diego's Bahia Resort Hotel on January 9 12 Most who attended the San Diego confab were the rank and file of assistedsuicide activism There is a division among activists over the means to reach their goal But the right to die organizations are more closely aligned than they may seem on the surface The origin and activities of two organizations the Hemlock Society and Compassion in Dying illustrate this phenomenon Ever since its co founding in 1980 by Derek and Ann Humphry the Hemlock Society has been viewed as the street fighter element of the euthanasia movement Hemlock publicly led failed attempts to legalize aid in dying in California and Washington Xl openly supported Jack Kevorkian Xl published the suicide manual Final Exit By comparison Compassion in Dying CXD has a staid public image Xl drapes itself with the respectable aura of a professional organization that works within the system Currently headed by Barbara Coombs Lee a former managed care company executive who was one of the chief petitioners21 for SPRING 2003 35

RITA L MARKER Oregon's successful voter initiative CID has spearheaded the court cases to have laws against assisted suicide declared unconstitutional It is also known as the go to group for information about and implementation of the Oregon law However few people are aware that CID's roots are in Hemlock type inyour face activities CID was founded after the 1991 defeat of Washington State's aid in dying initiative Its purpose was to offer suicide assistance for deserving cases 22 Ralph Mero the organization's first executive director described it as an outgrowth of the Washington State Hemlock Society 23 which he also directed It was the first ms group to admit publicly that it offered actual suicide assistance As detailed by Mero himself CID was involved in 24 prescription overdose deaths during its first 13 months of operation24 a time when assisted suicide was not legally permitted even in Oregon Efforts to downplay links between CID and Hemlock were described at the San Diego conference by Dr Peter Goodwin CID's current medical director Summarizing the 1994 Oregon campaign Goodwin said Hemlock was our money cow Without Hemlock's financial resources we would have been dead in the water However the campaign publicly and intentionally distanced itself from Hemlock The campaign concentrated on pain and suffering while it emphasized the measure's safeguards Key also in the Oregon success was the neutral stance taken by the Oregon Medical Association OMA Goodwin who had been a professor of medicine at the Oregon Health Sciences University Oregon's only medical school for many years and had taught close to half of Oregon physicians at one time or another was almost single handedly responsible for the OMA's position of neutrality He explained that early in the 94 campaign the OMAconsidered two resolutions One would have reaffirmed the OMA's support for the American Medical Association's position opposing assisted suicide in general The other would have put the OMA in specific direct opposition to the Oregon proposal At the meeting where the resolutions were considered Goodwin and the OMA's incoming president successfully argued that no action should be taken on either resolution since it would be best to let the people of Oregon tell us what they want The strategy was successful Assisted suicide advocates did not need the OMA to endorse their position They did need and they did achieve a hands off stance According to Goodwin that neutrality allayed the fears of the general population since it sent a message that if the OMA could tolerate this the claim of the opposition that this was hugely dangerous lost some of its power 36 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Three years later voters were asked to decide whether to repeal the law The OMA did express opposition to assisted suicide at that time According to Goodwin that was only because opponents stacked the House of Delegates and only permitted him to speak once Goodwin said the OMA's 1997 position had little effect and merely served to confuse voters The law was not repealed When Oregon's law went into effect in 1997 three years after its passage Goodwin assumed the role of CID's medical director and CID has been active in facilitating most of the reported assisted suicide cases in the state If a patient's own physician opposes assisted suicide or believes the patient does not fit the Oregon law's criteria CID will arrange the death According to Goodwin about 75 percent ofthose who die using Oregon's assistedsuicide law do so with CID's assistance He said he has been present at a number of assisted suicides which he called aid in dying and described this as an incredible privilege I've delivered many many babies he said but this is the deepest privilege to share this sort of intimacy with patients and with their families And I wish more physicians would appreciate that because it might involve more of them in this process Goodwin explained that almost all who choose to die using the Oregon law do so for reasons of autonomy The deaths result from large doses of liquid Nembutal obtained from certain selected pharmacists around the state and all have been peaceful and complication free Even with the rosy picture he painted Goodwin acknowledged that the future is still very very uncertain and very very cloudy in Oregon This is due in part to the discomfort that many older physicians still feel about participating in assisted suicide He also attributed the uncertainty to the court case pending over Attorney General Ashcroft's directive that would prohibit physicians from using their federal licenses to prescribe federallycontrolled substances for assisted suicide 25 In light of those concerns he urged attendees to prevent conservatives from rolling back the clock We cannot afford to continue to be sort of passive and namby pamby about this he said We have got to fight lH emlloclk's CJrOWIlll fewell As she made abundantly clear at the Portland conference Faye Girsh is not passive when it comes to pushing assisted suicide and she found a receptive audience in San Francisco She explained the origin and rationale for the Caring Friends program described in the conference program as Hemlock's Crown Jewel SPRING 2003 37

RITA L MARKER Girsh paid tribute to Ralph Mero as the person who started CID after the defeat of our first initiative in Washington State and described Caring Friends as an extension of Mero's work Indeed it does follow the spirit of CID's founding That group had been formed to circumvent laws against assisted suicide Now with CID implementing the Oregon law Hemlock's Caring Friends has picked up the baton to assist in deaths outside of any legal boundaries A catalyst for Caring Friends as it is currently organized came when other states failed to follow Oregon's lead and after attempts to gain court approval for assisted suicide failed Not willing to accept the outcome of those losses Girsh and others became angry and frustrated Well damn it we had to do something she explained Gosh you know you go hrough all the channels and they don't help you so you have to take things into your own hands She said she asked herself Why do we have to wait for Justice Rehnquist or this person or that person or the Pope to decide how we're going to die An Arizona woman who later killed herself provided 40,000 in seed money to begin training volunteers to facilitate deaths through Caring Friends The program now has 104 trained volunteers in various states and is conducting additional sessions to increase that number 26 To emphasize why more Caring Friends are needed Girsh referred to the New Year's Eve suicides of Morris and Estelle Spivack The elderly Floridians who had been married for forty two years leaped to their deaths from their seventeenthfloor condominium window Although increasingly feeble neither was terminally ill The two left a note with clear burial instructions and the names of relatives and their lawyers she said Do we need to expand the Caring Friends program Yes Ostensibly with Caring Friends assistance the deaths would still have taken place but would have been less messy Hemlock's willingness to look favorably on double suicides is not new In a Final Exit chapter titled Going Togeth r Derek Humphry wrote Some couples choose to die together regardless of whether both are in poor health or only one That the couple would wish to die together is a tribute to the strength of a loving relationship 27 Caring Friends PJrocedlllIres Caring Friends is coordinated out of Hemlock's Denver headquarters by Lois Shafer 28 the community services director for the Hemlock Foundation Schafer outlined the volunteer training program and the procedure for obtaining the group's services She said Hemlock pays for half of the airfare and hotel costs for trainees 38 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW Those selected for training are expected to be good listeners since volunteers become close to those whom they assist She explained that even if the person who will be using the program may have a loving family around they don't want to drag everybody down and they don't want to be a pall on the household According to Shafer the process for hastening a death begins when a person contacts the Denver office To receive Caring Friends services a person must be a Hemlock member 29 However Hemlock board member Arthur Metcalfe assured participants that this requirement does not present a problem since people can and often do join Hemlock and request the services of Caring Friends on the same day After the assisted suicide candidate submits medical records and a written personal statement the senior committee looks at them and decides if we can risk this one Once the go ahead is given the Denver office calls a volunteer in the field to give information about the person and asks if the volunteer would be willing to fly to the person needing services If so background information and records are sent to the volunteer who then phones the person and arranges a personal visit Not all Caring Friends assisted suicides involve personal visits How to instructions plastic exit bags and information about procuring substances are all available by mail If they get to the point where they say Okay I want to set a date now then we contact one of our senior Caring Friends These are people who have more experience being at the bedside of folks who have self delivered Shafer said She claimed that the program puts a lot of effort into working with the family Families are so grateful when they call us after the fact she said Shafer neglected to mention that some families are horrified by Caring Friends involvement in a loved one's death See A Widow's Story below p 43 It is something that could eventually cause problems for the Hemlock Society Michael Evans an attorney who provides legal advice for the organization compared the role of the senior volunteer to that of an auditor who comes in and reviews the situation in a kind of socio psycho medical way Protecting the organization is important Despite the fact that we talk about speedy and peaceful dying he said that is not our goal The goal is to have a good decision and a good decisional process He pointed out that that process will be extremely important in any legal proceedings And after predicting that there would be litigation he made a pitch to participants to contribute to a legal defense fund so funds will be available when needed The process for obtaining medical records for the senior committee to SPRING 2003 39

RITA L MARKER review is somewhat dicey Dr Richard MacDonald Hemlock's medical director 30 said We don't suggest you go to your physician and say I want you to send my medical records to the Hemlock Society He told the audience that attendance at a hastened death is a great privilege When the time for the death has arrived the volunteer who did the preliminary work a senior volunteer and often MacDonald go to what he called the scene of the chosen death It's not a medical procedure he admitted but said his presence has to ensure that people were comfortable that their loved ones and the volunteers would understand how death occurs He said I've been at more dying events in the last four years than in fifty years of practice He wouldn't give exact numbers but he did say that he has been present at over 85 of the more than120 Caring Friends deaths that have taken place in a four year period I'm sort of a midwife to ensure that we depart safely and surely and as peacefully as possible he said I want to tell you what a privilege it is to attend a hastened death Those who use the services of Caring Friends have done so because they don't want their loved ones to see them die badly he said This is a control issue Exit Bags and Gas And what exactly is used to accomplish deaths assisted by Caring Friends None other than the plastic bag a method that euthanasia activists have suggested for many years 3 MacDonald explained that when Caring Friends first began it used barbiturates but it has been increasingly difficult for people to obtain them As a result We have had to shift to techniques using plastic bags and helium That remarkably has become an acceptable method of hastening death His initial abhorrence of plastic bags has disappeared In seeing the technique used he said we have seen it to be the principal technique used in Caring Friends Over the years customized Exit Bags have been designed for this purpose An advertisement in Hemlock's newsletter promoted the Exit Bag as a necessity Data from the Netherlands reveal that in 20 of self deliverances involving lethal dosages of medications individuals do not die quickly but linger in a coma for up to four days This is why how to guides such as Final Exit and Departing Drugs also recommend the use ofplastic bags for self deliverance 32 An information sheet that accompanies shipment of the Exit Bag describes its features Optional neck band for turtleneck fit Adjustable velcro strip for snug but comfortable fit with sewn in elastic and flannelette collar 40 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Extra large size to minimize discomforts of overheating and breathing difficulties Praising the merits of the bag it states The customized EXIT BAG takes the guesswork out of the use of plastic bags Instead of using bags that ate too small faulty in some way fastened too tightly with elastic or tape the customized EXIT BAG allows you to make IIJlleIl OlID2ln 2l j1Lll ft mrM lIDft OIl 2l efty 2llID Comfr'ort 33 New models of the Exit Bag have been introduced in the last few years in particular a model designed for use with helium gas Like the original bag the new bag described as a fast safe and efficient method has been advertised in Hemlock publications 34 In addition Hemlock newsletter articles have promoted the helium plastic bag method One such article describes it as a gentle quick and certain death 35 The gas disperses easily and is difficult to trace in a corpse 36 Readers are assured that a little twitching in the arms and legs doesn't last long and should be expected Among the practical tips given is that one should say goodbye before the bag is pulled over the head since once the flow of gas begins the helium makes the voice sound like Donald Duck A final pitch is made for using Hemlock's program Although there have been reported good deaths with just family present we strongly recommend contacting the Caring Friends program to provide the expertise needed 3 The same advice has been repeated in other articles In one Girsh pitched a new Hemlock publication that has illustrated directions for the use of helium 38 But once again she suggested that it would be a good idea to have someone from Caring Friends present Even if we published Helium for Dummies we still think that having someone with expertise present is needed Ending your life can be complex you only do it once and failure could be disastrous 39 Hemlock also markets a video about Caring Friends It is intended to gain further recognition for the country's only nationwide program providing free in home counseling to hopelessly ill people who want to evaluate their options 40 At the San Diego conference MacDonald was asked if plastic bags could cause an image problem for the assisted suicide movement He acknowledged that they could but said that the vast majority of people accept the bag and inert gas It is a very speedy process he said and it has never failed in our program Nonetheless he's not satisfied with the status quo MacDonald himself plans to die by lethal injection and said he can do that because he's a doctor He believes it is unfair that this option is not available to everyone since it treats non physicians as second class citizens SPRING 2003 41

RITA L MARKER Conclusion As indicated by speakers and participants at the Portland and San Diego conferences there are definitely differences about strategy within the assisted suicide movement However this tension between those who advocate patience and those who promote plastic bags should not be mistaken for differences about the goal Activists are committed to eventual achievement of death on demand Past losses will not stop them from pursuing every avenue to achieve that goal Some wil1 concentrate on legal challenges some on legislative activity some on future voter initiatives and others on activities that ignore the law Furthermore in spite of their surface disagreement it is unli ely that the turmoil will weaken their resolve and their cooperation with each other For example while participants at the Hemlock Society's San Diego conference seemed to overwhelmingly eschew traditional attempts to bring about legal change preferring the Caring Friends approach Hemlock is bankrolling a legislative proposal in Vermont The role being played by Hemlock is similar to the one it fulfilled in Oregon during that state's initiative campaign i e the behind the scenes money cow After the Portland and San Diego conferences the Vermont measure41 was introduced as were proposals in the Hawaii42 and Arizona43 legislatures The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals scheduled oral arguments in Oregon v Ashcroft No matter what the outcome of the case it is almost certain to be appealed to the U S Supreme Court Exploratory plans and preparation for introduction of ballot initiatives are underway in several states And Caring Friends has stepped up its activities Assisted suicide activists want a win now more than ever They know that if they are perceived as winning anywhere by any means they have a far greater opportunity to retain financial support and to obtain public support It is thus imperative for all those who seek to protect vulnerable people from the threats of euthanasia and assisted suicide to remain informed vigilant dedicated and active 42 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW When Sue went to bed one night she thought she and her husband Bill would be taking a much anticipated trip to Mexico in the near future But the next morning Sue's life and plans were shattered She woke up and found that her husband wasn't beside her At first she wasn't alarmed It wasn't unusual for Bill to get up before she did Sue went into the kitchen expecting to see him But he wasn't there She called out to him He didn't answer Then she went into their home office She was met with a scene she will never forget Bill was in his chair dead There was a plastic bag over his head Attached to it was tubing running to a canister of helium gas Next to Bill's chair Sue found all kinds ofmaterials from Hemlock's Caring Friends There was a video tape There were explicit how to instructions that even described how a person should practice before the actual death event Later searching for answers Sue called Hemlock's Denver office and talked to Lois Shaferwho heads Caring Friends Sue said there were no apologies from Shafer Instead Shafer told her that Caring Friends always reviews medical records to make sure the program is appropriate for those who are seeking services Sue was shocked Here was a stranger who had decided Bill should get help to commit suicide As for any review ofBill's medical records it's not clear how or whether that was done Bill's doctor was as shocked as Sue when Bill died Neither of them had any idea that Bill was considering suicide Although 46 yearold Bill had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis several years earlier the only sign of his condition was his use of a cane He still drove his car Sue doesn't know how Bill first learned about Hemlock nor does she know how long he was in contact with the group before his death But she does know that Caring Friends was aggressive in contacting him She told me she found unerased messages on their answering machine indicating that Caring Friends had called Bill again and again and again The days and months since Bill's death have been difficult for Sue She gets through one day at a time The International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide receives many calls from people with similar tragic stories but does not publicly discuss them unless a person volunteers to make the facts known to others Sue not her real name asked that her story be told She wants to warn others about Hemlock's Caring Friends If it saves just one life she told me sharing her story will be worthwhile Rita Marker SPRING 2003 43

RITA L MARKER NOTES 1 Oregon Death with Dignity Act ORS 127.800 127.995 Oregon's state Medicaid program covers the cost of drugs prescribed for the purpose of assisted suicide See Steve Woodward Oregon will cover assisted suicide Oregonian Feb 27 1998 and Cyrus Sanai Death Stamps No joke Oregon will pay you to die Slate June 3 1999 2 Oregon's assisted suicide law was challenged in the courts but those challenges were dismissed not on the merits but because the Plaintiffs lacked standing Lee v Oregon 107 F 3d 1382 9th Cir 1997 cert denied sub nom Lee v Harcleroad U S 927 1997 3 Euthanasia and assisted suicide are often used interchangeably however the acts constituting each are different One way to distinguish them is to look at the last act the act without which death would not occur Using this distinction if a third party performs the last act that intentionally causes a patient's death euthanasia has occurred For example giving a patient a lethal injection or putting a plastic bag over her head to suffocate her would be considered euthanasia On the other hand if the person who dies performs the last act assisted suicide has taken place Thus it would be assisted silicide if a person swallows an overdose of drugs that has been provided by a doctor for the purpose of causing death It would also be assisted suicide if a patient pushes a switch to trigger the flow of helium gas into a plastic bag that has been placed over his head 4 Like many of those in attendance at the Portland conference Rogers has a long history of activism She previously held executive positions at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America the Pro Choice Public Education Project and the American Civil Liberties Union 5 Official reports do indicate that deaths under the Oregon assisted suicide law are problem free However from the beginning of the law's implementation the state agency charged with compiling official reports has conceded that it cannot detect or collect data on issues of noncompliance with accuracy Oregon's Death with Dignity Act The First Year Experience Department of Human Resources Oregon Health Division Center for Disease Prevention and Epidemiology Feb 18 1999 p 9 Furthermore it has even admitted that reporting physicians may have fabricated their versions of the circumstances surrounding the prescriptions written for patients For that matter the entire account could have been a cock and bull story We assume however that physicians were their usual careful and accurate selves Oregon Health Division CD Summary March 16 1999 p 2 Official Reports and the CD Summary can be accessed through http www internationaltaskforce orglsptlt2 htm 6 Baron co authored a 1996 model law for other states to use in emulating and expanding Oregon's statute Charles H Baron et ai Statute A Model State Act to Authorize and Regulate Physician Assisted Suicide 33 Harvard Journal on Legislation 1 34 1996 The model act would permit assisted suicide for a patient who has a terminal illness or a bodily disorder that causes the patient to prefer death to life 7 Vacco v Quill 521 U S 793 1997 and Washington v Glucksberg 521 U S 702 1997 In both cases assisted suicide activists sought to have state laws against assisted suicide declared unconstitutional The U S Supreme Court in a unanimous decision found that such laws do not violate the U S Constitution 8 The Maine Death with Dignity Act appeared on the ballot as Question I in November 2000 9 Krischer v Mclver 697 So 97 Fla 1997 In a 5 to 1 ruling the Florida Supreme Court found that Florida's law against assisted suicide does not violate the state constitution's right to privacy provision 10 Sampson v State 31 P 3d 88 2001 In a unanimous decision the Alaska Supreme Court found that the state's law against assisted suicide did not violate the privacy and liberty provisions of the state constitution 11 Hawaii's Death with Dignity Act HB2487 HDI and SB 2745 passed in the Hawaiian House of Representatives on March 7 2002 but was defeated in the State Senate on May 2 2002 12 In mid January 2003 assisted suicide measures HB 862 and SB 391 were introduced again in Hawaii Unlike the previous governor Gov Linda Lingle who took office in January is not an advocate of assisted suicide and it appears that without the governor's backing the measures will die in committee 13 Washington voters turned down the Death with Dignity Act Initiative 119 that would have legalized aid in dying on November 5 1991 by a vote of 54 to 46 percent 44 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW 14 The campaign to place the Humane and Dignified Death Act which would have legalized euthanasia and assisted suicide under the name aid in dying failed to gain enough signatures to be placed on the 1988 California ballot California's Death with Dignity Act Proposition 161 which would have permitted aid in dying did qualify for the ballot but it failed on November 3 1992 by the same margin 54 to 46 percent as the previous year's Washington state ballot initiative 15 Model Aid in Dying Act Iowa Law Review 1989 75 139 The Model Act is available online at http www uiowa edu sfklaw euthan html Last accessed Sept 26 2002 For a discussion of aid in dying for children see Kids and Euthanasia Human Life Review Vol XXVI No 1 Winter 2000 pp 47 75 16 Timothy Quill Death and Dignity A Case of Individualized Decision Making 324 NEJM 691 March 7 1991 In a 1994 article in the same publication Quill called for legalization of physician assisted suicide not only for those who are terminally ill but for those who have incurable debilitating illnesses 331 NEJM 119 120 17 Vacco V Quill 521 U S 793 1997 18 For a discussion of the illusory nature of safeguards in Oregon's assisted suicide law see Assisted Suicide The Continuing Debate accessible at http www internationaltaskforce org cd htm 19 In 1997 Time magazine named Angeil one of the 25 most influential Americans She currently serves on the Advisory Board of Compassion in Dying Articles she has written advocate both assisted suicide and euthanasia See for example Marcia Angell Euthanasia 319 NEJM 1348 Nov 17 1988 Marcia Angell Time to Consider Mercy Killing Washington Post Health Section Aug 15 1989 Marcia Angell Don't Criticize Dr Death NY Times June 15 1990 and Marcia Angell The Supreme Court and Physician Assisted Suicide The Ultimate Right 336 NEJM 50 Jan 2 1997 20 Girsh is currently senior vice president of the Hemlock Society She previously served as the organization's executive director and as its president 21 A voter initiative must receive a requisite number signatures before it can be placed on the ballot for voter approval Petitioners are those who carryall of the signatures to the Secretary of State's office Barbara Coombs Lee was one of three petitioners for Measure 16 Oregon's assisted suicide law 22 Ralph Mero An Omega Interview 261 OMEGA Journal of Death and Dying 1,6 1994 23 Ibid 24 Dick Lehr Supporting Those Who Want to Die A Seattle Group Including Doctors and Clergy Offers Help and Advice for Suicide Boston Globe Jan 18 1994 p 6 and William Cartsen When Patients Choose to Die Seattle Group Gives Assisted Suicide Momentum in Courts San Francisco Chronicle June 3 1996 p AI 25 Goodwin was referring to Oregon v Ashcroft which is currently before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals For information about implications of the Ashcroft directive see Ashcroft to Oregon Stop Breaking the Law Human Life Review Vol XXVII No 4 Fall 2001 pp 4245 Additional information about the case can be accessed http www internationaltaskforce orgl ashcroft htm 26 Active recruitment and training for volunteers is ongoing At the San Diego conference Shafer announced a training scheduled to begin in Orlando Florida In recent months Hemlock spokespersons have been promoting Caring Friends programs not only in areas where they were previously active but in such places as Montana and in eastern Washington 27 Derek Humphy Final Exit Hemlock Society 1992 p 101 28 In 1993 Shafer led an unsuccessful attempt to challenge Colorado's law against assisted suicide 29 Another requirement for those seeking Caring Friends services is that the person be suffering from an irreversible physical condition that seriously compromises his or her quality of life Hemlock Member Handbook Hemlock Society p 8 On file with author 30 MacDonald of Chico CA was in general practice in Chico and in Canada between 1965 and 1993 He became Hemlock's medical director in 1993 and continued to practice part time until 1996 31 Derek Humphy Final Exit Hemlock Society 1992 pp 95 101 Chapter Nineteen SelfDeliverance via the Plastic Bag The chapter addresses such practicalities as whether one should use a clear or opaque plastic bag how to practice putting the bag over the head and securing it SPRING 2003 45

RITA L MARKER with a ribbon or rubber band Humphry notes that he has provided information about the plastic bag method since 1981 32 Hemlock Timelines No 72 July Aug September 1997 p 12 emphasis in original 33 Introducing the customized EXIT BAG from The Right to Die Society of Canada emphasis in original On file with author 34 Hemlock Timelines No 79 Spring 1999 p 11 35 Helium Hemlock Timelines No 83 Spring 2000 p 12 36 Ibid 37 Ibid 38 Faye Girsh Self Deliverance Helium EOL Choices Vol I No 1 Winter 2002 pp 5 The Hemlock Society re designed its newsletter in 2002 and changed the name from Timelines to EOL Choices 39 Ibid 40 Inside Hemlock Caring Friends Video Released EOL Choices Vol I No 2 Spring 2002 p 15 There is another group that makes house calls to assist suicide with the plastic bag helium gas method That method was used by George Exoo of West Virginia's Compassionate Chaplaincy when he and his companion assisted a suicide in Ireland See Rita L Marker House Calls for Death HLR Vol XXVIII Nos 1 2 Winter Spring 2002 pp 95 102 Since that article was published Irish authorities have instituted extradition proceedings to bring Exoo to trial in Ireland 41 The Vermont Death with Dignity Act HB 318 and SB 112 was introduced in the Vermont legislature in February 2003 42 The Hawaii Death with Dignity Act HB 862 and SB 391 was introduced in the Hawaii legislature in January 2003 43 Arizona's Aid in Dying Act HB 2454 was introduced in the Arizona House of Representatives in February 2003 In Arizona Hemlock is publicly identified as the bill's drafter Phil Riske Aid in Dying Measure Returns Capital Times Feb 14,2003 f That's his answer to everything 46 SPRING 2003

UNSPEAKABLE CONVERSATIONS OR HOW I SPENT ONE DAY AS A TOKEN CRIPPLE AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

lUJllspeakabite CCoD versatioD Or Harriet McBryde Johnson IHIe insists he doesn't want to kill me He simply thinks it would have been better all things considered to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child It has nothing to do with me I should not feel threatened Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms my brain gets so fried it's almost fun Mercy It's like Alice in Wonderland It is a chilly Monday in late March just less than a year ago I am at Princeton University My host is Prof Peter Singer often called and not just by his book publicist the most influential philosopher of our time He is the man who wants me dead No that's not at all fair He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill at any age individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them persons What does it take to be a person Awareness of your own existence in time The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future including the preference for continuing to live At this stage of my life he says I am a person However as an infant I wasn't I like all humans was born without self awareness And eventually assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless formless all or nothing then I'll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life Then he says my family and doctors might put me out ofmy misery or out of my bliss or oblivion and no one count it murder I have agreed to two speaking engagements In the morning I talk to 150 undergraduates on selective infanticide In the evening it is a convivial discussion over dinner of assisted suicide I am the token cripple with an opposing view I had several reasons for accepting Singer's invitation some grounded in lHIllIrriet McBryde Johnson is a lawyer in solo practice in Charleston S C She has been a disability rights activist and advocate for more than 25 years This essay first appeared in the New York Times Magazine February 16 2003 Reprinted with permission 2003 Harriet McBryde Johnson SPRING 2003 47

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON my involvement in the disability rights movement others entirely personal For the movement it seemed an unusual opportunity to experiment with modes of discourse that might work with very tough audiences and bridge the divide between our perceptions and theirs I didn't expect to straighten out Singer's head but maybe I could reach a student or two Among the personal reasons I was sure it would make a great story first for telling and then for writing down By now I've told it to family and friends and colleagues over lunches and dinners on long car trips in scads of e mail messages and a couple of formal speeches But it seems to be a story that just won't settle down After all these tellings it still lacks a coherent structure I'm miles away from a rational argument I keep getting interrupted by questions like these Q Was he totally grossed out by your physical appearance A He gave no sign of it None whatsoever Q How did he handle having to interact with someone like you A He behaved in every way appropriately treated me as a respected professional acquaintance and was a gracious and accommodating host Q Was it emotionally difficult for you to take part in a public discussion of whether your life should have happened A It was very difficult And horribly easy Q Did he get that job at Princeton because they like his ideas on killing disabled babies A It apparently didn't hurt but he's most famous for animal rights He's the author of Animal Liberation Q How can he put so much value on animal life and so little value on human life That last question is the only one I avoid I used to say I don't know it doesn't make sense But now I've read some of Singer's writing and I admit it does make sense within the conceptual world of Peter Singer But I don't want to go there Or at least not for long So I will start from those other questions and see where the story goes this time That first question about my physical appearance needs some explaining It's not that I'm ugly It's more that most people don't know how to look at me The sight of me is routinely discombobulating The power wheelchair is enough to inspire gawking but that's the least of it Much more impressive is the impact on my body of more than four decades of a muscle wasting disease At this stage of my life I'm Karen Carpenter thin flesh mostly vanished a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin When in childhood my muscles got too weak to hold up my spine I tried a brace for a while but 48 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW fortunately a skittish anesthesiologist said no to fusion plates and pins all the apparatus that might have kept me straight At 15 I threw away the back brace and let my spine reshape itself into a deep twisty S curve Now my right side is two deep canyons To keep myself upright I lean forward rest my rib cage on my lap plant my elbows beside my knees Since my backbone found its own natural shape I've been entirely comfortable in my skin I am in the first generation to survive to such decrepitude Because antibiotics were available we didn't die from the childhood pneumonias that often come with weakened respiratory systems I guess it is natural enough that most people don't know what to make of us Two or three times in my life I recall particularly one largely crip largely lesbian cookout halfway across the continent I have been looked at as a rare kind of beauty There is also the bizarre fact that where I live Charleston S c some people call me Good Luck Lady they consider it propitious to cross my path when a hurricane is coming and to kiss my head just before voting day But most often the reactions are decidedly negative Strangers on the street are moved to comment I admire you for being out most people would give up God bless you I'll pray for you You don't let the pain hold you back do you If I had to live like you I think I'd kill myself I used to try to explain that in fact I enjoy my life that it's a great sensual pleasure to zoom by power chair on these delicious muggy streets that I have no more reason to kill myself than most people But it gets tedious God didn't put me on this street to provide disability awareness training to the likes of them In fact no god put anyone anywhere for any reason if you want to know But they don't want to know They think they know everything there is to know just by looking at me That's how stereotypes work They don't know that they're confused that they're really expressing the discombobulation that comes in my wake o What stands out when I recall first meeting Peter Singer in the spring of 2001 is his apparent immunity to my looks his apparent lack of discombobulation his immediate ability to deal with me as a person with a particular point of view Then 2001 Singer has been invited to the College of Charleston not two blocks from my house He is to lecture on Rethinking Life and Death I have been dispatched by Not Dead Yet the national organization leading the disability rights opposition to legalized assisted suicide and disability SPRING 2003 49

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON based killing I am to put out a leaflet and do something during the Q and A On arriving almost an hour early to reconnoiter I find the scene almost entirely peaceful even the boisterous display of South Carolina spring is muted by gray wisps of Spanish moss and mottled oak bark I roll around the comer of the building and am confronted with the unnerving sight of two people I know sitting on a park bench eating veggie pitas with Singer Sharon is a veteran activist for human rights Herb is South Carolina's most famous atheist Good people I've always thought now sharing veggie pitas and conversation with a proponent of genocide I try to beat a retreat but Herb and Sharon have seen me Sharon tosses her trash and comes over After we exchange the usual courtesies she asks Would you like to meet Professor Singer She doesn't have a clue She probably likes his book on animal rights I'll just talk to him in the Q and A But Herb with Singer at his side is fast approaching They are looking at me and Herb is talking no doubt saying nice things about me He'll be saying that I'm a disability rights lawyer and that I gave a talk against assisted suicide at his secular humanist group a while back He didn't agree with everything I said he'll say but I was brilliant Singer appears interested engaged I sit where I'm parked Herb makes an introduction Singer extends his hand I hesitate I shouldn't shake hands with the Evil One But he is Herb's guest and I simply can't snub Herb's guest at the college where Herb teaches Hereabouts the rule is that if you're not prepared to shoot on sight you have to be prepared to shake hands I give Singer the three fingers on my right hand that still work Good afternoon Mr Singer I'm here for Not Dead Yet I want to think he flinches just a little Not Dead Yet did everything possible to disrupt his first week at Princeton I sent a check to the fund for the 14 arrestees who included comrades in power chairs But if Singer flinches he instantly recovers He answers my questions about the lecture format When he says he looks forward to an interesting exchange he seems entirely sincere It is an interesting exchange In the lecture hall that afternoon Singer lays it all out The illogic of allowing abortion but not infanticide of allowing withdrawal of life support but not active killing Applying the basic assumptions of preference utilitarianism he spins out his bone chilling argument for letting parents kill disabled babies and replace them with nondisabled babies who have a greater chance at happiness It is all about allowing as many individuals as possible to fulfill as many of their preferences as possible As soon as he's done I get the microphone and say I'd like to discuss SO SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW selective infanticide As a lawyer I disagree with his jurisprudential assumptions Logical inconsistency is not a sufficient reason to change the law As an atheist Kobject to his using religious terms the doctrine of the sanctity of human life to characterize his critics Singer takes a notepad out of his pocket and jots down my points apparently eager to take them on and Kproceed to the heart of my argument that the presence or absence of a disability doesn't predict quality of life I question his replacement baby theory with its assumption of other things equal arguing that people are not fungible Kdraw out a comparison of myself and my nondisabled brother Mac the next born after me each of us with a combination of gifts and flaws so peculiar that we can't be measured on the same scale He responds to each point with clear and lucid counterarguments He proceeds with the assumption that Kam one of the people who might rightly have been killed at birth He sticks to his guns conceding just enough to show himself open minded and flexible We go back and forth for 10 long minutes Even as Kam horrified by what he says and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether Kought to exist I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility He is so respectful so free of condescension so focused on the argument that by the time the show is over I'm not exactly angry with him Yes K am shaking furious enraged but it's for the big room 200 of my fellow Charlestonians who have listened with polite interest when in decency they should have run him out of town on arai My encounter with Peter Singer merits a mention in my annual canned letter that December Kdecide to send Singer a copy In response he sends me the nicest possible e mail message Dear Harriet if he may Just back from Australia where he's from Agrees with my comments on the world situation Supports my work against institutionalization And then some pointed questions to clarify my views on selective infanticide Kreply Fine call me Harriet and I'll reciprocate in the interest of equality though I'm accustomed to more formality Skipping agreeable preambles Kanswer his questions on disability based infanticide and pose some of my own Answers and more questions come back Back and forth over several weeks it proceeds an engaging discussion of baby killing disability prejudice and related points of law and philosophy Dear Harriet Dear Peter Singer seems curious to learn how someone who is as good an atheist as he is could disagree with his entirely reasonable views At the same time I am trying to plumb his theories What has him so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities and not other kinds of SPRING 2003 51

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON babies if no infant is a person with a right to life I learn it is partly that both biological and adoptive parents prefer healthy babies But I have trouble with basing life and death decisions on market considerations when the market is structured by prejudice I offer a hypothetical comparison What about mixed race babies especially when the combination is entirely nonwhite who I believe are just about as unadoptable as babies with disabilities Wouldn't a law allowing the killing of these undervalued babies validate race prejudice Singer agrees there is a problem It would be horrible he says to see mixed race babies being killed because they can't be adopted whereas white ones could be What's the difference Preferences based on race are unreasonable Preferences based on ability are not Why To Singer it's pretty simple disability makes a person worse off Are we worse off I don't think so Not in any meaningful sense There are too many variables For those of us with congenital conditions disability shapes all we are Those disabled later in life adapt We take constraints that no one would choose and build rich and satisfying lives within them We enjoy pleasures other people enjoy and pleasures peculiarly our own We have something the world needs Pressing me to admit a negative correlation between disability and happiness Singer presents a situation imagine a disabled child on the beach watching the other children play It's right out of the telethon I expected something more sophisticated from a professional thinker I respond As a little girl playing on the beach I was already aware that some people felt sorry for me that I wasn't frolicking with the same level of frenzy as other children This annoyed me and still does I take the time to write a detailed description of how I in fact had fun playing on the beach without the need of standing walking or running But really I've had enough I suggest to Singer that we have exhausted our topic and I'll be back in touch when I get around to writing about him He responds by inviting me to Princeton I fire off an immediate maybe Of course I'm flattered Mama will be impressed But there are things to consider Not Dead Yet says and I completely agree that we should not legitimate Singer's views by giving them a forum We should not make disabled lives subject to debate Moreover any spokesman chosen by the opposition is by definition a token But even if I'm a token I won't have to act like one And anyway I'm kind of stuck If I decline Singer can make some hay I offered them a platform but they refuse rational discussion It's an old trick and I've laid myself wide open My invitation is to have an exchange of views with Singer during his undergraduate course He also proposes a second exchange open to the 52 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW whole university later in the day This sounds a lot like debating my lifeand on my opponent's turf with my opponent moderating to boot I offer a counterproposal to which Singer proves amenable I will open the class with some comments on infanticide and related issues and then let Singer grill me as hard as he likes before we open it up for the students Later in the day I might take part in a discussion of some other disability issue in a neutral forum Singer suggests a faculty student discussion group sponsored by his department but with cross departmental membership The topic I select is Assisted Suicide Disability Discrimination and the Illusion of Choice A Disability Rights Perspective I inform a few movement colleagues of this tum of events and advice starts rolling in I decide to go with the advisers who counsel me to do the gig lie low and get out of Dodge II ask Singer to refer me to the person who arranges travel at Princeton I imagine some capable and unflappable woman like my sister Beth whose varied job description at a North Carolina university includes handling visiting artists Singer refers me to his own assistant who certainly seems capable and unflappable enough However almost immediately Singer jumps back in via e mail It seems the nearest hotel has only one wheelchair accessible suite available with two rooms for 600 per night What to do I know I shouldn't be so accommodating but I say I can make do with an inaccessible room if it has certain features Other logistical issues come up We go back and forth Questions and answers Do I really need a lift equipped vehicle at the airport Can't my assistant assist me into a conventional car How wide is my wheelchair By the time we're done Singer knows that I am 28 inches wide I have trouble controlling my wheelchair if my hand gets cold I am accustomed to driving on rough irregular surfaces but I get nervous turning on steep slopes Even one step is too many I can swallow purees soft bread and grapes I use a bedpan not a toilet None of this is a secret none of it cause for angst But I do wonder whether Singer is jotting down my specs in his little notepad as evidence of how bad off people like me really are I realize I must put one more issue on the table etiquette I was criticized within the movement when I confessed to shaking Singer's hand in Charleston and some are appalled that I have agreed to break bread with him in Princeton I think they have a very good point but again I'm stuck I'm engaged for a day of discussion not a picket line It is not in my power to marginalize Singer at Princeton nothing would be accomplished by displays of personal disrespect However chumminess is clearly inappropriate I tell SPRING 2003 53

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON Singer that in the lecture hall it can't be Harriet and Peter it must be Ms Johnson and Mr Singer He seems genuinely nettled Shouldn't it be Ms Johnson and Professor Singer if I want to be formal To counter I invoke the ceremonial lowcountry usage Attorney Johnson and Professor Singer but point out that Mr Ms is the custom in American political debates and might seem more normal in New Jersey All right he says Ms Mr it will be I describe this awkward social situation to the lawyer in my office who has served as my default lunch partner for the past 14 years He gives forth a full body shudder That poor sorry son of a bitch He has no idea what he's in for Being a disability rights lawyer lecturing at Princeton does confer some c chet at the Newark airport I need all the cachet I can get Delta Airlines has torn up my power chair It is a fairly frequent occurrence for any air traveler on wheels When they inform me of the damage in Atlanta I throw a monumental fit and tell them to have a repairperson meet me in Newark with new batteries to replace the ones inexplicably destroyed Then I am told no new batteries can be had until the morning It's Sunday night On arrival in Newark I'm told of a plan to put me up there for the night and get me repaired and driven to Princeton by 10 a m That won't work I'm lecturing at 10 I need to get there tonight go to sleep and be in my right mind tomorrow What You're lecturing They told us it was a conference We need to get you fixed tonight Carla the gate agept relieves me of the need to throw any further fits by undertaking on my behalf the fit of all fits Carmen the personal assistant with whom I'm traveling pushes me in my disabled chair around the airport in search of a place to use the bedpan However instead of diaper changing tables which are functional though far from private we find a flip down plastic shelf that doesn't look like it would hold my 70 pounds of body weight It's no big deal I've restricted my fluids But Carmen is a little freaked It is her first adventure in powerchair air travel I thought I prepared her for the trip but I guess I neglected to warn her about the probability of wheelchair destruction I keep forgetting that even people who know me well don't know much about my world We reach the hotel at 10 15 p m four hours late I wake up tired I slept better than I would have slept in Newark with an unrepaired chair but any hotel bed is a near guarantee of morning crankiness I tell Carmen to leave the TV off I don't want to hear the temperature 54 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW K do the morning stretch Medical people call it passive movement but it's not really passive Carmen's hands move my limbs following my precise instructions her strength giving effect to my will Carmen knows the routine so it is in near silence that we begin easing slowly into the day K let myself be propped up to eat oatmeal and drink tea Then there's the bedpan and then bathing and dressing still in bed As the caffeine kicks in silence gives way to conversation about practical things Carmen lifts me into my chair and straps a rolled towel under my ribs for comfort and stability She tugs at my clothes to remove wrinkles that could cause pressure sores She switches on my motors and gives me the means of moving without anyone's help They don't call it a power chair for nothing K drive to the mirror K do my hair in one long braid Even this primal hairdo requires at this stage ofmy life joint effort I undo yesterday's braid fix the part and comb the hair in front Carmen combs where I can't reach I divide the mass into three long hanks and start the braid just behind my left ear Section by section I hand it over to her and her unimpaired young fingers pull tight crisscross until the braid is fully formed A big polyester scarf completes my costume Carmen lays it over my back I tie it the way I want it but Carmen starts fussing with it trying to tuck it down in the back I tell her that it's fine and she stops On top of the scarf she wraps thetwo big shawls that I hope will substitute for an overcoat I don't own any real winter clothes I just stay out of the cold such cold as we get in Charleston We review her instructions for the day Keep me in view and earshot Be instantly available but not intrusive Be polite but don't answer any questions about me I am glad that she has agreed to come She's strong smart adaptable and very loyal But now she is digging under the shawls fussing with that scarf again Carmen What are you doing I thought I could hide this furry thing you sit on Leave it Singer knows lots of people eat meat Now he'll know some crips sit on sheepskin The walk is cold but mercifully short The hotel is just across the street from Princeton's wrought iron gate and a few short blocks from the building where Singer's assistant shows us to the elevator The elevator doubles as the janitor's closet the cart with the big trash can and all the accouterments is rolled aside so I can get in Evidently there aren't a lot of wheelchair people using this building We ride the broom closet down to the basement and are led down a long passageway to a big lecture hall As the students drift in I engage in light SPRING 2003 55

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON badinage with the sound technician He is squeamish about touching me but I insist that the cordless lavaliere is my mike of choice I invite him to clip it to the big polyester scarf The students enter from the rear door way up at ground level and walk downstairs to their seats I feel like an animal in the zoo I hadn't reckoned on the architecture those tiers of steps that separate me from a human wall of apparent physical and mental perfection that keep me confined down here in my pit His 5 before 10 Singer is loping down the stairs I feel like signaling to Carmen to open the door summon the broom closet and get me out of here But Singer greets me pleasantly and hands me Princeton's check for 500 the fee he offered with apologies for its inadequacy So On with the show Mytalk to the students is pretty Southern I've decided to pound them with heart hammer them with narrative and say y'all and folks I play with the emotional tone giving them little peaks and valleys modulating three times in one 45 second patch I talk about justice Even beauty and love I figure they haven't been getting much of that from Singer Of course I give them some argument too I mean to honor my contractual obligations I lead with the hypothetical about mixed race nonwhite babies and build the ending around the question of who should have the burden of proof as to the quality of disabled lives And woven throughout the talk is the presentation of myself as a representative of a minority group that has been rendered invisible by prejudice and oppression a participant in a dIscussion that would not occur in a just world I let it go a little longer than I should Their faces show they're going where I'm leading and I don't look forward to letting them go But the clock on the wall reminds me of promises I mean to keep and I stop talking and submit myself to examination and inquiry Singer's response is surprisingly soft Maybe after hearing that this discussion is insulting and painful to me he doesn't want to exacerbate my discomfort His reframing of the issues is almost pro forma abstract entirely impersonal Likewise the students inquiries are abstract and fairly predictable anencephaly permanent unconsciousness eugenic abortion I respond to some of them with stories but mostly I give answers I could have e mailed in I call on a young man near the top of the room Do you eat meat Yes I do 56 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW Then how do you justify I haven't made any study of animal rights so anything I could say on the subject wouldn't be worth everyone's time The next student wants to work the comparison of disability and race and Singer joins the discussion until he elicits a comment from me that he can characterize as racist He scores a point but that's all right I've never claimed to be free of prejudice just struggling with it Singer proposes taking me on a walk around campus unless I think it would be too cold What the hell It's probably warmed up some Let's go out and see how I do He doesn't know how to get out of the building without using the stairs so this time it is my assistant leading the way Carmen has learned of another elevator which arrives empty When we get out of the building she falls behind a couple of paces like a respectful chaperone In the classroom there was a question about keeping alive the unconscious In response I told a story about a family I knew as a child which took loving care of a nonresponsive teenage girl acting out their unconditional commitment to each other making all the other children and me as their visitor feel safe This doesn't satisfy Singer Let's assume we can prove absolutely that the individual is totally unconscious and that we can know absolutely that the individual will never regain consciousness I see no need to state an objection with no stenographer present to record it I'll play the game and let him continue Assuming all that he says don't you think continuing to take care of that individual would be a bit weird No Done right it could be profoundly beautiful But what about the caregiver a woman typically who is forced to provide all this service to a family member unable to work unable to have a life of her own That's not the way it should be Not the way it has to be As a society we should pay workers to provide that care in the home In some places it's been done that way for years That woman shouldn't be forced to do it any more than my family should be forced to do my care Singer takes me around the architectural smorgasbord that is Princeton University by a route that includes not one step unramped curb or tum on a slope Within the strange limits of this strange assignment it seems Singer is doing all he can to make me comfortable He asks what I thought of the students questions They were fine about what I expected I was a little surprised by the question about meat eating SPRING 2003 57

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON I apologize for that That was out of left field But I think what he wanted to know is how you can have such high respect for human life and so little respect for animal life People have lately been asking me the converse how you can have so much respect for animal life and so little respect for human life And what do you answer I say 1 don't know It doesn't make a lot of sense to me Well in my view Look 1 have lived in blissful ignorance all these years and I'm not prepared to give that up today Fair enough he says and proceeds to recount bits of Princeton history He stops This will be of particular interest to you 1 think This is where your colleagues with Not Dead Yet set up their blockade I'm grateful for the reminder My brothers and sisters were here before me and behaved far more appropriately than 1 am doing A van delivers Carmen and me early for the evening forum Singer says he hopes I had a pleasant afternoon Yes indeed I report a pleasant lunch and a very pleasant nap and I tell him about the Christopher Reeve Suite in the hotel which has been remodeled to accommodate Reeve who has family in the area Do you suppose that's the 600 accessible suite they told me about Without doubt And if I'd known it was the Christopher Reeve Suite 1 would have held out for it Ofcourse you would have Singer laughs And we'd have had no choice would we We talk about the disability rights critique of Reeve and various other topics Singer is easy to talk to good company Too bad he sees lives like mine as avoidable mistakes I'm looking forward to the soft vegetarian meal that has been arranged I'm hungry Assisted suicide as difficult as it is doesn't cause the kind of agony I felt discussing disability based infanticide In this one I understand and to some degree can sympathize with the opposing point of view misguided though it is My opening sticks to the five minute time limit I introduce the issue as framed by academic articles Not Dead Yet recommended for my use Andrew Batavia argues for assisted suicide based on autonomy a principle generally held high in the disability rights movement In general he says the movement fights for our right to control our own lives when we need assistance to effect our choices assistance should be available to us as a matter of right If the choice is to end our lives he says we should have 58 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW assistance then as well But Carol Gill says that it is differential treatmentdisability discrimination to try to prevent most suicides while facilitating the suicides of ill and disabled people The social science literature suggests that the public in general and physicians in particular tend to underestimate the quality of life of disabled people compared with our own assessments of our lives The case for assisted suicide rests on stereotypes that our lives are inherently so bad that it is entirely rational if we want to die I side with Gill What worries me most about the proposals for legalized assisted suicide is their veneer of beneficence the medical determination that for a given individual suicide is reasonable or right It is not about autonomy but about nondisabled people telling us what's good for us In the discussion that follows I argue that choice is illusory in a context of pervasive inequality Choices are structured by oppression We shouldn't offer assistance with suicide until we all have the assistance we need to get out ofbed in the morning and live a good life Common causes ofsuicidalitydependence institutional confinement being a burden are entirely curable Singer seated on my right participates in the discussion but doesn't dominate it During the meal I occasionally ask him to put things within my reach and he competently complies I feel as if I'm getting to a few of them when a student asks me a question The words are all familiar but they're strung together in a way so meaningless that I can't even retain them it's like a long sentence in Tagalog I can only admit my limitations That question's too abstract for me to deal with Can you rephrase it He indicates that it is as clear as he can make it so I move on A little while later my right elbow slips out from under me This is awkward Normally I get whoever is on my right to do this sort of thing Why not now Kgesture to Singer He leans over and I whisper Grasp this wrist and pull forward one inch without lifting He follows my instructions to the letter He sees that now Kcan again reach my food with my fork And he may now understand what I was saying a minute ago that most of the assistance disabled people need does not demand medical training A philosophy professor says It appears that your objections to assisted suicide are essentially tactical Excuse me By that I mean they are grounded in current conditions of political social and economic inequality What if we assume that such conditions do not exist Why would we want to do that I want to get to the real basis for the position you take SPRING 2003 59

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON I feel as if I'm losing caste It is suddenly very clear that I'm not a philosopher I'm like one of those old practitioners who used to visit my law school full of bluster about life in the real world Such a bore A once sharp mind gone muddy And I'm only 44 not all that old The forum is ended and I've been able to eat very little of my pureed food I ask Carmen to find the caterer and get me a container Singer jumps up to take care of it He returns with a box and obligingly packs my food to go When I get home people are clamoring for the story The lawyers want the blow by blow of my forensic triumph over the formidable foe when I tell them it wasn't like that they insist that it was Within the disabilityrights community there is less confidence It is generally assumed that I handled the substantive discussion well but people worry that my civility may have given Singer a new kind of legitimacy I hear from Laura a beloved movement sister She is appalled that I let Singer provide even minor physical assistance at the dinner Where was your assistant she wants to know How could I put myself in a relationship with Singer that made him appear so human even kind I struggle to explain I didn't feel disempowered quite the contrary it seemed a good thing to make him do some useful work And then the hard part I've come to believe that Singer actually is human even kind in his way There ensues a discussion of good and evil and personal assistance and power and philosophy and tactics for which I'm profoundly grat eful I e mail Laura again This time I inform her that I've changed my will She will inherit a book that Singer gave me a collection of his writings with a weirdly appropriate inscription To Harriet Johnson So that you will have a better answer to questions about animals And thanks for coming to Princeton Peter Singer March 25,2002 She responds that she is changing her will too I'll get the autographed photo of Jerry Lewis she received as an M D A poster child We joke that each of us has given the other a reason to live I have had a nice e mail message from Singer hoping Carmen and I and the chair got home without injury relaying positive feedback from my audiences and taking me to task for a statement that isn't supported by a relevant legal authority which he looked up I report that we got home exhausted but unharmed and concede that he has caught me in a generalization that should have been qualified It's clear that the conversation will continue I am soon sucked into the daily demands of law practice family community 60 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW and politics In the closing days of the state legislative session I help get a bill passed that I hope will move us one small step toward a world in which killing won't be such an appealing solution to the problem of disability It is good to focus on this kind of work But the conversations with and about Singer continue Unable to muster the appropriate moral judgments I ask myself a tough question am I in fact a silly little lady whose head is easily turned by a man who gives her a kind of attention she enjoys I hope not but I confess that I've never been able to sustain righteous anger for more than about 30 minutes at a time My view of life tends more toward tragedy 1fhetragic view comes closest to describing how I now look at Peter Singer He is a man of unusual gifts reaching for the heights He writes that he is trying to create a system of ethics derived from fact and reason that largely throws off the perspectives of religion place famil tribe community and maybe even species to take the point of view of the universe His is a grand heroic undertaking But like the protagonist in a classical drama Singer has his flaw It is his unexamined assumption that disabled people are inherently worse off that we suffer that we have lesser prospects of a happy life Because of this all too common prejudice and his rare courage in taking it to its logical conclusion catastrophe looms Here in the midpoint of the play I can't look at him without fellow feeling I am regularly confronted by people who tell me that Singer doesn't deserve my human sympathy I should make him an object of implacable wrath to be cut off silenced destroyed absolutely And I find myself lacking a logical argument to the contrary I am talking to my sister Beth on the phone You kind of like the monster don't you she says I find myself unable to evade certainly unwilling to lie Yeah in a way And he's not exactly a monster You know Harriet there were some very pleasant Nazis They say the SS guards went home and played on the floor with their children every night She can tell that I'm chastened she changes the topic lets me off the hook Her harshness has come as a surprise She isn't inclined to moralizing in our family I'm the one who sets people straight When I put the phone down my argumentative nature feels frustrated In my mind I replay the conversation but this time defend my position He's not exactly a monster He just has some strange ways of looking at things SPRING 2003 61

HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON He's advocating genocide That's the thing In his mind he isn't He's only giving parents a choice He thinks the humans he is talking about aren't people aren't persons But that's the way it always works isn't it They're always animals or vermin or chattel goods Objects not persons He's repackaging some old ideas Making them acceptable I think his ideas are new in a way It'snot old fashioned hate It's a twisted misinformed warped kind ofbeneficence His motive is to do good What do you care about motives she asks Doesn't this beneficent killing make disabled brothers and sisters just as dead But he isn't killing anyone It's just talk Just talk It's talk with an agenda talk aimed at forming policy Talk that's getting a receptive audience You of all people know the power of that kind of talk Well sure but If talk didn't matter would you make it your life's work But I say his talk won't matter in the end He won't succeed in reinventing morality He stirs the pot brings things out into the open But ultimately we'll make a world that's fit to live in a society that has room for all its flawed creatures History will remember Singer as a curious example of the bizarre things that can happen when paradigms collide What if you're wrong What if he convinces people that there's no morally significant difference between a fetus and a newborn and just as disabled fetuses are routinely aborted now so disabled babies are routinely killed Might some future generation take it further than Singer wants to go Might some say there's no morally significant line between a newborn and a 3 year old Sure Singer concedes that a bright line cannot be drawn But he doesn't propose killing anyone who prefers to live That overarching respect for the individuai's preference for life might some say it's a fiction a fetish a quasi religious belief Yes I say That's pretty close to what I think As an atheist I think all preferences are moot once you kill someone The injury is entirely to the surviving community So what if that view wins out but you can't break disability prejudice What if you wind up in a world where the disabled person's irrational preference to live must yield to society's rational interest in reducing the incidence of disability Doesn't horror kick in somewhere Maybe as you watch the door close behind whoever has wheeled you into the gas chamber That's not going to happen 62 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Do you have empirical evidence she asks A logical argument Of course not And I know it's happened before in what was considered the most progressive medical community in the world But it won't happen I have to believe that Belief Is that what it comes down to Am I a person of faith after all Or am I clinging to foolish hope that the tragic protagonist this one time will shift course before it's too late I don't think so It's less about belief less about hope than about a practical need for definitions I can live with If I define Singer's kind of disability prejudice as an ultimate evil and him as a monster then I must so define all who believe disabled lives are inherently worse off or that a life without a certain kind of consciousness lacks value That definition would make monsters of many of the people with whom I move on the sidewalks do business break bread swap stories and share the grunt work of local politics It would reach some of my family and most of my nondisabled friends people who show me personal kindness and who sometimes manage to love me through their ignorance I can't live with a definition of ultimate evil that encompasses all of them I can't refuse the monster majority basic respect and human sympathy It's not in my heart to deny every single one of them categorically my affection and my love The peculiar drama of my life has placed me in a world that by and large thinks it would be better if people like me did not exist My fight has been for accommodation the world to me and me to the world As a disability pariah I must struggle for a place for kinship for community for connection Because I am still seeking acceptance of my humanity Singer's call to get past species seems a luxury way beyond my reach My goal isn't to shed the perspective that comes from my particular experience but to give voice to it I want to be engaged in the tribal fury that rages when opposing perspectives are let loose As a shield from the terrible purity of Singer's vision I'll look to the corruption that comes from interconnectedness To justify my hopes that Singer's theoretical world and its entirely logical extensions won't become real I'll invoke the muck and mess and undeniable reality of disabled lives well lived That's the best I can do SPRING 2003 63

MOST DANGEROUS THAN A MONSTER: PETER SINGER IS TENURED

More Dangerous than a Monster Peter Singer Is Tenured Nat Hentoff Despite some of her friends urging Harriet McBryde Johnson not to debate Peter Singer she made the right choice all the more so because that event led to a cover story by her in the New York Times Magazine A chance for millions of readers to see not in the abstract but a living very immediate refutation of Singer's lethal and influential utilitarian doctrine that certain lives are not worth living The late A J Muste the direct action pacifist who was a key strategist in the anti Vietnam War movement and in many Gandhi like ventures around the world used to tell me he would sup with the Devil to see if he could find even a kernel of humanity in that Prince of Darkness In her Times article Johnson did challenge this tenured apostle of mercy killings but she wasted too much space being impressed by Singer's gentlemanly manners Having supped with the Devil A J Muste would not have been sidetracked even if Lucifer had discoursed on the infinite beauty of Beethoven's late quartets During one passage Johnson writes We go back and forth for ten long minutes I would much rather have known more details of that dialogueand the other disagreements between them at Princeton than being told that she was dazzled by his verbal facility He is so respectful she continued so free of condescension so focused on the argument that by the time the show is over I'm not exactly angry with him I have interviewed Peter Singer at some length and yes he was reasonably courteous and attentive to my intensely fundamental disagreements with his view of imperfect human beings And had the conversation not been on the phone I'm sure he would have offered me tea But I came away with no less a feeling of repugnance at his smugness at being so superior in his exercise of pure reason shorn of sentimentality in his lifework to remove unsightly persons for the greater good of the rest of us Singer did not condescend to me I threw him off guard by telling him that my contrary views did not come from any religious impetus but that I am an atheist However his invincible righteous smugness was there throughout the conversation reminding me of the television debate I once had with Nat Hentofl a columnist for the Village Voice has authored several books including Living the Bill ofRights How to Be an Authentic American Harper Collins and Speaking Freely Knopf 64 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW bioethicist Dr Alexander Morgan Capron who had devised a precise mathematical formula to determine which damaged infants should be allowed to survive I have described such bioethicists as Capron as being among the new priesthood of death and Singer is the Archbishop Singer's influence on these transmogrifiers of compassion was illustrated in the Cambridge Quarterly ofHealth Care Ethics in the fall of 2000 when Capron and another of that coven Dr Lawrence J Schneiderman wrote A judge who orders that a severely disabled child be kept alive rarely sees firsthand the long term continuing consequences of that decision which remain a continuing vivid experience for the health care professionals who must care for the child Such trauma you see can be avoided by disposing of the severely disabled child and as Singer has counseled by then advising the parents to try for better luck next time Had Johnson been less dazzled by Singer's verbal facility and instead confronted him and their audiences at Princeton with Dr Leo Alexander's all too prophetic 1949 article Medical Science Under Dictatorship The New England Journal of Medicine the readers of her article in the Times might have been more disturbed on their day of rest Elsewhere Singer's gentility becomes fractured when his views are compared with those of the Nazis He is indeed not a Nazi but I regret not having reminded him in our interview of Leo Alexander's report that the first direct order for euthanasia was issued by Hitler on September 1 1939 All state institutions were required to report on patients who had been ill five years or more and who were unable to work The decisions regarding which patients should be killed were made entirely on the basis of this brief information by expert consultants most of whom were professors of psychiatry in the key universities These consultants never saw the patients themselves Emphasis added I wish Johnson in writing of her Unspeakable Conversations for the large and influential New York Times audience had pressed Singer more insistently on his responsibility as the best known bioethicist in the worldfor lives that have been ended summarily and not only of infants by those practicing utilitarians of death who do see the patients they kill although they are unknown to Singer Official euthanasia is growing The Netherlands Belgium Switzerlandas well as in more and more American hospitals as Wesley Smith an invaluable chronicler of death with dignity has documented Dr Leo Alexander shortly before his death in the 1980 s warned that the barriers SPRING 2003 65

NAT HENTOFF against killing are coming down and Smith has become the preeminent illuminator of the accuracy of Alexander's prophecy IfJohnson gets another invitation to Princeton I hope she ftrst reads Wesley Smith's The Clone Hustlers in the Fall 2002 issue of this Review in which he tells of another tenured Princeton professor Lee Silver in the biology department who ardently proposes modifying human genes to create new human beings In that shining new world as Smith notes the ubermenschen GenRich will utterly dominate the untermenschen Naturals who will be taught only the kills necessary to serve the master race I think Johnson while attimes effectively countering Singer's own view of achieving human perfectibility let him off too easily by spending too much space on his pleasant manners That he is not a monster personally is irrelevant to the monstrous results of his cherished beliefs However I do believe the article was very much worth the writing and the positioning in so widely read a publication The lasting impression I believe it will have is that Johnson herself is a compelling refutation of Singer's blithe advocacy of the termination of inferior lives he will never see What is so vivid in her writing are the multiple dimensions of her active engaged life and her searching resilience intelligence and wit She may have been too kind to Peter Singer but now that he has actually met and seen her I think and hope Harriet McBryde Johnson may appear disconcertingly in his dreams Oh don't go I promise one more drink and you'll find me attractive 66 SPRING 2003

GETTING TO THE BOTTOM

CG ftting to the Bottom George McKenna II walk into the room and Bill O'Reilly is on TV talking to a professor The professor deplores the loss of innocent life in the invasion ofJrraq O'Reilly is pretty smug as usual at one point reminding the professor that hey c'mon you're not talking to your students here But the professor is unruffled speaks in measured language and with seeming command of the facts O'Reilly isn't well prepared at one point he lets the professor get away with the canard that the U S supplied Saddam with his poison gas and ends up sounding defensive He says he'll give the professor the last word and then doesn't The segment is over and then K find out that the professor who deplores the loss of innocent life is Peter Singer of Princeton University It is a jaw dropping moment on TV a talk show host known for his hardboiled grilling of guests allows someone who advocates selective baby killing to pass himself off as a humanitarian Harriet McBryde Johnson was similarly and in a way more profoundly taken in by Peter Singer though this may not at first be as apparent as it was in the case of Bill O'Reilly Unlike O'Reilly she knows about the dangers of legitimating Singer by giving him a forum That she says is the position of her disability rights group Not Dead Yet and Kcompletely agree Yet she evidently doesn't completely agree because she then proceeds to relate the story of all her friendly exchanges in Singer's classroom at dinner and in e mails with a man who thinks that people like her should be put to death early in life Some of the subsequent letter writers to the New York Times Magazine applauded her for disregarding her friends advice One of them calls the dialogue a feat of amazing grace another contends that she was right not to think of Singer as a monster and another goes so far as to call Singer a dispassionate scholar seeking truth Their shared assumption is that a nice dispassionate debate with him couldn't hurt Kpassionately disagree For more than three centuries liberals have celebrated the virtues of public debate John Milton Thomas Jefferson John Stuart Mill Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr all came up with some version or another of what Holmes called free trade in ideas The theory is that if people argue and debate enough the truth will out Perhaps less well known is that all of these advocates of George McJI e1I1l1I1l2 is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at City College New York and coeditor of Taking Sides Clashing Views on Controversial Political Issues He is writing a book on the Puritan origins of American patriotism SPRING 2003 67

GEORGE MCKENNA free and open debate set limits and bounds to the debates Milton excluded Catholics from the debate because he feared that they would use it to reverse the gains already made in human freedom Jefferson banned Federalist books at the University of Virginia for the same reason Mill did not think that barbarians were ready for freedom and Holmes used his famous hypothetical about shouting fire in a crowded theater to justify the jailing of dissidents during wartime Today's liberals would probably not agree with these particular limitations on free speech but they are no less prepared to set bounds to debate That doesn't mean jailing people or censoring their writings but it does mean refusing to grant respectable status to them Princeton University does not have an endowed chair for teaching that blacks are racially inferior It would not even hire such a person to be an untenured assistant professor or a part time adjunct or a teaching assistant It would probably not allow him on campus to talk to a student club And what Princeton student club would invite him Implicitly then today's liberals acknowledge what the great liberal thinkers explicitly recognized certain ideas in certain circumstances before certain audiences can be massively lethal and so we must find some way of marginalizing them keeping them off campus so to speak So what do you do with people who preach child murder It depends If we're talking about your average street corner orator you just leave him alone Americans are long used to these types Some people listen some don't most stroll on by But what if they have given him a chair at a major university Then you deal with him by protests posters petitions piCket lines civil disobedience pointed questions shouted across a room You get in his face What you do not do is to shake his hand enjoy a meal with him let him help you around and carry on a cozy e mail dialogue with him You don't have a civil debate with him because he is by design and declaration an enemy of our inherited civilization Harriet McBryde Johnson for reasons that do not seem quite clear even to her decided to sleep with the enemy It never should have happened But it did so we might as well get into the substance of the debate Her basic approach was to cast it as a civil rights debate Her article is replete with terms like discrimination token cripple and disability rights and she accuses Singer of preaching genocide as if disability were a racial category To be more specific she tries to frame the issue not according to the Martin Luther King model of universal civil rights but in the Malcolm X model of black power It started in the mid 1960s There was black power and then successively Latino power sisterhood is powerful red power gay pride and gray pride 68 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW Now Harriet Johnson and apparently some others in the organization she represents wants it to be something like disabled pride All these power and pride movements have a common philosophical core a tendency to identify one attribute of a person with the person's very self I am black and I am beautiful and what makes me beautiful is my blackness my essence is blackness Substitute Latino or any of the other categories and the formula works the same way It is logically problematic in scholastic jargon one could say that it confuses accident with essence but rhetorically very potent Nobody except a bigot is going to say that black is not beautiful So we sort of get bullied into saying yes yes of course But for Harriet Johnson it doesn't work at all not even rhetorically We see this when she confronts Singer with an analogy between an abandoned mixed race baby and a baby with serious disabilities In both cases she says it will be difficult to find families willing to adopt Would it then be morally permissible to kill the mixed race baby No Singer replies because the mixed race baby has no physical or mental problems whereas a disability makes a person worse off She denies this Disabled people enjoy pleasures other people enjoy and pleasures peculiarly our own We have something the world needs Now this is very delicate and has to be approached delicately Let's start with her statement that we have something the world needs Who is the we in this statement Is it all disabled people Or only those who have the courage determination wisdom and other virtues that enable them to rise above their disabilities and make something beautiful of their lives But surely that could not include all disabled people some no doubt succumb to depression and simply give up Yet she uses the word we which is an all inclusive word The only thing all disabled people have in common is their disability Therefore when she says that we have something the world needs she must be referring to their disability What all the world needs is their disability This is what comes of identifying one of the attributes of a person with the person herself She weakens her case even more in the descriptive portions of her article Let's back up for a moment Singer said that a disabled child is worse off than other children and gives as an example a disabled child on a beach who is unable to frolic with the other children She replies by providing a description of how I in fact had fun playing on the beach without the need of standing walking or running I am sorry to say this but a child who is unable to run and play on the beach as the other children do is other things being equal worse off than the other children Fortunately other things SPRING 2003 69

GEORGE MCKENNA are never equal and I believe her when she says that she was able to have her own kinds of pleasures at the beach But that was not because of her disability but because of other attributes she possesses intelligence imagination a sense of humor emotional toughness and serenity These are the qualities she should extol not her disability Instead what she does through much of the article is actually to show off her disability as if that were what she is proud of And so we read about her bathroom rituals her bedpan the use of changing tables in restrooms her dietary limitations grapes soft food the help she needs to reach the salt shaker in front of her her recurring hassles with airlines over her wheel chair battery and so on Not only do we not need to know these things they actually lend plausibility to Singer's proposition that she is worse off than people without her dis bilities Singer's proposition is of course stupid it is like saying that I because I have weak eyes am worse off than somebody with 20 20 vision who is locked up in Sing Sing but we are talking here about rhetorical effectiveness From that standpoint she has done her cause no good by parading her disabilities Yet that is just one offshoot of the main weakness in her argument which as I have said is the attempt to cast disability rights in the mold of civil rights You can say if you like that black is beautiful or female is beautiful but nobody can plausibly argue that a disability per se is beautiful Why did she resort to such a clumsy paradigm to make the case against child murder Wouldn't it have been better simply to remind Singer that our nation and our civilization are founded on the sanctity of human life so that nobody has the right intentionally to kill children The answer is she doesn't want to use any language about the sanctity of human life because that is religious talk and she like Singer is an atheist Let's talk about atheism Broadly speaking there are two different kinds of atheists old fashioned atheists and modem atheists Agnosticism is for the seminar room in living our lives we have to put down our bets on God or no God Perhaps this is generational but all my atheist friends are the old fashioned kind Most are pro choice but that is only because they have allowed themselves to believe that a child in the womb is not really a child Every one of them however would shudder at the thought of deliberately killing an already born child That is because they like all old fashioned atheists cling to the moral heritage of Judeo Christian civilization even as they reject its religious foundation Modem atheism on the other hand is more ambitious and daring It wants to explore the full implications of a godless universe Karl Marx one of its pioneers accused previous writers of not taking atheism seriously enough 70 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW He criticized Ludwig Feuerbach one of the important left Hegelians on these grounds Feuerbach who characterized all religious belief as illusionistic contended that Christianity projects onto God all the beautiful qualities which rightly belong to man Theology should therefore be replaced by anthropology and other human sciences in order to establish a genuine human community on earth Not good enough said Marx Feuerbach hadn't thought enough about the current actual conditions of economic exploitation that give rise to the illusions of Christianity These can be resolved not by study but by radical action In bourgeois society Atheism pushed to its conclusion is revolution IFriedrich Nietzsche was another modern atheist Posters for Bass Ale have his photo next to a pint of their famous product with the caption Getting to the Bottom of Things Nietzsche was all for that He was scornful of atheists who failed to take atheism seriously They rejected Christianity but continued to honor all that Christian derived twaddle about equality and human rights Through Christianity the individual was made so important so absolute that he could no longer be sacrificed but the species endures only through human sacrifice All souls equal before God but this is precisely the most dangerous of all possible evaluations If one regards individuals as equal one calls the species into question Now Singer wants to go Nietzsche one better beyond species and beyond what he calls speciesism He intends to launch a new moral revolution by discarding the Linnaean system We all remember those schematic trees from our biology classes the hierarchy that has homo sapiens at the top then the other primates apes lemurs monkeys and below them in descending order birds amphibians reptiles and so on until we get down to sponges and protozoa The Linnaean system is anthropomorphic and so Singer thinks needs to be replaced with a shared hierarchy At the top would be intelligent and physically autonomous creatures humans and animals and then down the scale would be those humans and animals which are increasingly dependent and or unintelligent You can see where this goes If we have no right to slaughter a one year old child what right do we have to slaughter a pig which is just as intelligent And it also works the other way if we have a right to put down a hopelessly sick puppy why don't we have a similar right to kill painlessly of course a hopelessly sick child As for a newborn a neonate no problem at all In Singer's 1979 book Practical Ethics he asserted that there is no inherent ethical difference between killing a day old infant and killing a snail So relentless is Peter Singer in pursuing the logic of our partnership with SPRING 2003 71

GEORGE MCKENNA animals that in recent years he has taken to wondering why we can't be lovers as well as friends In a review essay that appeared in 2000 he maintained that humans and nonhumans can have mutually satisfying sexual relations He wrote the review for a porno magazine so he used obscenities to refer to sexual acts and female genitalia He described an encounter between a woman and an orangutan living in Borneo This should be no cause for shock or disgust he wrote because we are animals indeed more specifically we are great apes Thus he concluded the idea of sex between humans and non humans ceases to be an offense to our status and dignity as human beings The main thing is that nobody should get hurt in these encounters he ruled out for example sex with hens Harriet McBryde Johnson seems intimidated by Singer's animal rights philosophy On at least three occasions in her article she is challenged to respond to it and each time she runs away from it Singer taunts her playfully at the end when he gives her a book of his writings with the inscription To Harriet Johnson So that you will have a better answer to questions about animals Why is she at such a loss to respond to an extremist ideology an ideology from which every animal protection society in the world except the wacko group PETA has distanced itself The answer seems obvious to me How could she do it without bringing up the Christian belief in the soul or the Judeo Christian doctrine of man's dominion over the animal kingdom If she tried to use the pre Christian way of distinguishing man from lower animals by saying that man is the only animal who uses language and lives in a political community Singer would probably come back with references to communities of apes and the language of whales Anyway the ancient Greeks and Romans would probably side with Singer on the issue of selective infanticide This is indeed a problem for atheists Village Voice columnist Nat Hentoff an atheist who opposes abortion not to mention infanticide once half seriously suggested that the solution might be to declare unborn children animals thus securing much greater protection for them than they now enjoy Perhaps the idea has some merit if we killed 1.5 million dolphins every year there would certainly be an outcry from environmentalists but it does not get to the heart of the question why does an infant Harriet McBryde Johnson have an inalienable right to live Perhaps we could work up a purely secular answer by invoking Immanuel Kant's dictum about treating people as ends rather than means but Singer correctly considers Kant as operating within the Judeo Christian tradition and so dismisses him Peter Singer is a crackpot an intellectual descendent of nineteenth century phrenologists the people who went around putting calipers on people's 72 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW heads to gauge their mental fitness Yet it would be a mistake to minimize his importance and for two reasons first because he is taken very seriously by the intellectual community Gust as the phrenologists were in their time second because he confronts many intellectuals with a serious challenge If they reject God and the religious heritage of the West on what grounds can they assert that innocent human beings have an inalienable right to life Before Singer the last serious challenge of this sort came from the Nazis The roots of Nazism or at least with what we have come to think of as its worst horror lay not in German nationalism or even anti Semitism but in the proposition once accepted by leading doctors scientists philosophers and jurists throughout Europe and even North America Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr and Margaret Sanger were fans of it in the United States that we would all be better off if certain categories of people ceased to exist The Germans with their usual economy of words called it lebensunwertes Leben life unworthy of life Michael Korda one of the letter writers to the Times Magazine asks plaintively does it occur to nobody that Peter Singer's opinions on the subject of killing the mentally and physically handicapped however sincerely meant have eerie similarities to those of Hitler In fact as Robert Lifton has shown in The Nazi Doctors 1986 the thinking behind the killing long preceded Hitler's takeover of Germany An article making the case for it The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life was published in 1920 co written by two distinguished German professors the jurist Karl Binding and psychiatry professor Alfred Hoche Like Singer they argued their case logically and professionally stressing the therapeutic side of it Destroying such unworthy lives they concluded is purely a healing treatment and a healing work When the Third Reich's poisonous weeds were crushed under Allied tanks in 1945 we thought we could all breathe freely again But they didn't get the roots And now the roots are sprouting again SPRING 2003n3

Commentary on 6 Unspeakable Conversations David S Oderberg Harriet McBryde Johnson's article is extraordinary She herself is extraordinary Many commentators and correspondents to the New York Times have already noted this I can only echo the sentiment To say that it takes courage and dignity for someone in Miss Johnson's position severely physically handicapped as she is publicly to confront a prominent academic with views as odious and threatening as those of Professor Peter Singer is an understatement The gentility and diffidence with which she de cribes her fears her reservations and her reaction to the person of Singer the elegance of her writing her humility in not pretending to be philosophically clued up like Singer or a match for his quick thinking and ease in front of an audience of mostly fawning students and faculty all of these qualities shine through in her article As an academic myself long opposed in print to Singer's execrable doctrines I find it both salutary and refreshing to see that a well crafted and highly personal article such as Miss Johnson's can achieve more in persuasiveness than hundreds of pages of drily argued academic text So it is in this spirit that I merely offer some comments and observations on her story my points being made in no special order of importance To begin readers of Miss Johnson's article might get the impression that Singer never advocates the killing of the disabled as an obligation only as an option The truth is that for Singer as a utilitarian who believes that maximizing good effects over bad is all that matters in morality killing a disabled child even a child with no physical or mental disability but merely an illness as mild as haemophilia would be a duty if it maximized the satisfaction of people's preferences e g those of the parents family doctors providers of health care resources health insurance companies etc etc and had no adverse effects on others 2 Utilitarians do notjust give optionsthey impose obligations Hence when Miss Johnson wonders why Singer is so convinced it would be best to allow parents to kill babies with severe disabilities and not other kinds of babies if no infant is a person with a right to life my reply is Do not wonder about it because other kinds of babies may be killed too since all non persons are replaceable just like barnyard animals or even snails 3 David S Oderberg is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Reading England and author of among other things Moral Theory and Applied Ethics Blackwell 2000 During July and August 2003 he will be a Visiting Scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center Bowling Green State University Bowling Green Ohio 74 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW Secondly the article gives the impression that Singer allows the preferences of persons the ones on his theory who happen to be actively rational and self aware including disabled persons to trump all other desires he doesn't propose killing anyone who prefers to live The truth is however that for Singer killing can sometimes be obligatory even in the case of persons They may have the strongest of all claims on life but the fact is if we are preference utilitarians we must allow that a desire to go on living can be outweighed by other desires 4 If for example we reached the limit to the burden of dependence which any community can carry 5 we might have to apply the principle that in some cases it would be right to kill a person who does not choose to die on the grounds that the person will otherwise lead a miserable life 6 Perhaps Singer gave a different impression to Miss Johnson in private conversation or public debate but she must look to his official position as expressed again and again in print A good example of the danger of being misled by what Singer might say off the cuff rather than concentrating on the views he puts in print and teaches in lectures concerns that slippery six letter word rights Miss Johnson understandably perpetuates the impression gained mainly by those who have come to Singer's philosophy through his work on animal liberation namely that he believes in animal rights and presumably if he believes in those he must also believe in rights for those of us lucky enough to be persons rlliose my personhood and therefore my right to life he's most famous for animal rights He's the author of Animal Liberation The truth is however that like all utilitarians Peter Singer does not believe in rights He subscribes to the slogan of the father figure of utilitarianism Jeremy Bentham that rights are nonsense upon stilts But this does not mean Singer ensures the public are aware that he does not believe in rights for although he says I am not convinced that the notion of a moral right is a helpful or meaningful one 7 he also adheres to the practical principle that t he language ofrights is a convenient political shorthand It is even more valuable in the era ofthirty second TV news clips 8 Just as he is quite happy for the public to be deceived into thinking he believes in rights I am not aware of his correcting anyone who perpetuates the myth so he also countenances deceiving people into thinking their desire to go on living trumps all other desires 9 Miss Johnson when politely upbraided by Singer for having such high respect for human life and so little respect for animallife i e for eating meat as though that entailed having little respect for animal life brilliantly shoots back People have lately been asking me the converse how you can have so much respect for animal life and so little respect for human life SPRING 2003nS

DAVID S ODERBERG Which hits the nail on the head of what Peter Singer is all about Animal liberationists need to think twice and three times before trumpeting the fable that Singer has striven might and main to elevate the status of animals in society Certainly he has worked hard to promote their welfare campaigning against intensive farming methods with the cruelty and misery they typically entail and against the brutality ofmuch animal experimentation in the name of scientific progress And he has been the guiding light behind the bizarre Great Ape Project aimed at conferring civil rights on higher primates But what Singer is really about is debasement not elevation levelling down human beings with their unique and irreplaceable moral worth to the status of clever animals in the Darwinian jungle ingredients in the utilitarian melting pot just so many bearers of units of quality in the calculations of social engineers and phileconomists if I may be allowed a novel barbarism One might wonder if the tasty bait of animal liberation were not dangled before the eyes of well meaning people would they ever be sucked in by the professor's depraved views on human beings views which as Miss Johnson correctly advocates should not be given a forum The question of forums and public debates is a painful theme of Miss Johnson's article She has wrestled long and hard under enormous pressure from her colleagues at Not Dead Yet over the question whether even to shake hands with such a man as Singer let alone give his views legitimacy by engaging with him in public debate My impression is that her head was for it but her heart well against She thought perhaps correctly that she could put up a good show and that Singer's views simply should not go unchallenged I would agree with strong caveats Spokesmen for the disabled such as Miss Johnson are generally well trained in sparring with their opponents Although she does not give many details my impression again is that Miss Johnson acquitted herself well But without some focused schooling in what someone like Singer really stands for it can be easy to be bamboozled as she also was when a colleague of Singer's suggested that her opposition to assisted suicide was essentially tactical i e not based on principle but on how bad things would be in the current state of society if people were allowed help in killing themselves Hence I recommend that anyone ever charged with the task of debating Singer in public should familiarise themselves carefully with Singer's published writings They are generally easy to read and quite accessible albeit chock full of intellectual sleight of hand slippery reasoning euphemism and skilful but distracting polemic They are easily mined for juicy quotations and in fact a BBC television interviewer with no knowledge of philosophy and little knowledge 76 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW of Singer once did an expert job taking him apart piece by piece How Simply by quoting the professor back to himself and reducing his ideas to simple straightforward propositions that any viewer could understand It worked brilliantly and left Singer flummoxed but it takes confidence to pull it off w Nevertheless although I encourage skilled people to take Singer head on and not allow him to waffle his way from coast to coast for the next umpteen years of his tenure at the Center for Human Values Princeton University I also believe that the man should not be given a public forum to air his intellectual poison Following the Cambridge philosopher Jenny Teichman I distinguish between Peter Singer's right to speak and his right to regular access to a public platform The former might be a universal human right but the latter certainly isn't The latter is in fact a special right or better a privilege that goes with one's official status as politician religious leader public expert or teacher as Teichman points out the privilege is not always deserved It can be used for good and also for evil In my view academics abuse the privilege when they advocate euthanasia of human beings too young or too old or too ill to answer back II Toward the end of her splendid article Harriet McBryde Johnson describes Peter Singer's philosophical project as a grand heroic undertaking Was she merely being generous or does she in fact believe it Perhaps both I wish I had such generosity but after years of studying Singer's thought and writings after seeing his views become more and more extreme to the point that he now thinks bestiality is shall we say an activity much malignedI2 after all this I find it hard to believe that there is any grandeur or heroism at the heart of Singer's philosophy What John Stuart Mill himself a utilitarian said of Bentham's philosophy that it was a philosophy fit for swine can be said with equal justice of the work of Peter Singer It may not have gained him the respect of those who cherish human life in all its stages and conditions it may not have won him a lasting reputation as a profound thinker but it did get him a chair at Princeton NOTlES 1 Words enclosed in double quotation marks are taken directly from the article unless indicated otherwise 2 The example of haemophilia is from Singer Practical Ethics Cambridge England Cambridge University Press 1993 second edition p 186 3 Singer's analogies not mine Practical Ethics pp 90 132 33 185 88 4 Practical Ethics p 99 5 P Singer and H Kuhse Should the Baby Live Oxford Oxford University Press 1985 p 170 6 Practical Ethics p 100 7 Practical Ethics p 96 SPRING 2003177

DAVID S OOERBERG 8 Animal Liberation London Jonathan Cape 1990 second edition p 8 9 Practical Ethics pp 99 100 191 192 10 I can send anyone on request a crib sheet of quotations I have taken from Singer's writings My email isd s oderberg reading ac uk 11 J Teichman Freedom of Speech and the Public Platform Journal ofApplied Philosophy 11 1994 pp 99 105 at p 104 12 See his review of Midas Dekkers Dearest Pet On Bestiality published on www nerve comin 2001 and also in the British magazine Prospect April 2001 I've been training him to feign affection 78 SPRING 2003

UNSPEAKABLE CONVERSATIONS FOR GOOD ATHEIST

Unspeakable Conversations for Good Atheists Mark Pickup IFor more than ten years people with disabilities and incurable illnesses have lived in the cross hairs of modem Western culture's intolerance of imperfect human life The champions of euthanasia assisted suicide abortion and infanticide have steadily gained ground What was once unthinkable killing the unwanted sick and disabled has become fashionably speakable in academic circles It was a grim milestone when America's prestigious Princeton University gave a permanent platform to Peter Singer to promote his ideas of killing babies born with disabilities and euthanizing disabled adults with severe cognitive impairments Whoever came up with the title Unspeakable Conversations for Harriet McBryde Johnson's New York Times Magazine article is decades out of date Johnson's rambling article was an achievement of public education about travel frustrations and indignities for the disabled It was not however a significant contribution to the ethical discussion about the value of people with disabilities in a progressive advanced society Sadly Johnson missed a wonderful opportunity to help the New York Times vast audience see that people with disabilities are equal and important members of society Johnson seemed awed by Singer's celebrity his good company and his superficial Aussie charm Poor Ms Johnson even the Devil is charming Wait As she tells us many times she is an atheist She doesn't believe in God or the Devil Atheism seems to be the only point of consensus between her and Singer If there is no God no grand designer then in the final analysis we are nothing more than products of cosmic chance descendants of primordial slime Words like right wrong better worse meaningful and meaningless are themselves meaningless They are words that assume some objective standard by which ideas and behavior can be measured and judged Thought itself is a chemical reaction or a collection of electrical impulses in the brain Nothing more Morality is meaningless to a chemical reaction just as the electricity driving my computer cannot be judged as right or wrong Thought simply occurs like the spread of ripples after a pebble is thrown into a pond What's this nonsense about ethics philosophy and human value Mark lP'icllmp is disabled with advanced stages of progressive multiple sclerosis He writes about ethical and faith issues from his home in Canada SPRING 2003 79

MARK PICKUP Human rights Equality Drivel Morality The fiction of religion We simply exist until our life is extinguished If there is no God then there's no moral scale And yet when Ms Johnson says I didn't expect to straighten out Singer's head she must have a concept of distorted thinking which can be measured against straight thinking which she presumably has Could it be that Ms Johnson believes more than she is willing to admit perhaps even to herself Peter Singer definitely has a belief system He believes the universe has no purpose and that lesser minds like Aristotle were wrong to think it does Singer believes with all his heart in the pointlessness of the universe And so we find ourselves back at the utter meaninglessness of everything philosophy the pursuit of knowledge music love language and communication have no purpose According to the belief system of Peter Singer even his own words ideas and beliefs are meaningless Followed to its absurd conclusion this belief system goes nowhere Life is hard and then you die If you accept this all further discussion is pointless If the reader feels as if he is spinning in circles that's because Peter Singer's central premise is circular So why if the universe has no purpose do we find Singer in the vanguard ofthe animal rights movement Surely in that case animals have no purpose either Why does he make a preposterous exception to bestow purpose upon animals while man and the rest of the universe have none But in reading Peter Singer you quickly find that it's not that animals would be elevated above the status of humans humans would descend below the status of animals When Johnson was confronted with this aspect of Singer's world she refused to enter it When she was asked How can he place so much value on animal life and so little value on human life her response was this That last question was the only one I avoid I used to say I don't know it doesn't make sense But now I've read some of Singer's writings and I admit it does make sense within the conceptual world of Peter Singer But I don't want to go there Or at least not for long But we must go there Ms Johnson we must peer into the abyss of his thinking with its poisonous vapors rising intoxicating us and enticing us into a new Dark Age Wemust critically examine the implications ofSinger's infernal world view then recoil in horror and reject his thinking Far better that than to allow his alluring logic gradually to take over the collective public mindset His ideas have the capacity to tum progressive societies into jungles of predators and prey oppressors and oppressed Genuine progress is found not in ideas but in the lives of people even people Peter Singer would discard 80 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW And that brings me to a central point that Harriet Johnson would not address Singer operates in an historical vacuum He rejects the towering foundational concepts of America his adopted country especially the selfevident truth that all people have certain inalienable rights which include the right to life liberty and the pursuit ofhappiness That blazing Declaration of Independence does not say people have a right to happiness only the right to pursue happiness But it does not allow arbiters to decide which people are qualified to pursue happiness It does not allow any individual to decide that another person's chances of happiness are so low that his life should be extinguished thereby denying him the first right mentioned in the Declaration the right to life How do inalienable rights come about There must be something or someone above human law to bestow them if they really exist There must be a higher law above any legislature that creates inalienable rights Rights granted by a government on Monday can be taken away on Friday by a simple majority vote And that would make the Declaration of Independence absolute nonsense lit is ironic that Peter Singer uses his tenure at Princeton University to tear at the bedrock ideals embodied in the Declaration of Independence One of the signers of that august Declaration was a Presbyterian minister named John Witherspoon 1723 1794 He helped infuse that document and America's founding concepts with Christian thinking Witherspoon was Princeton's sixth President a position he held until his death In fact Princeton University originally named The College of New Jersey was founded in 1746 by Presbyterians Until 1902 every President of Princeton was a Christian minister One of Witherspoon's predecessors was America's great evangelist and theologian Jonathan Edwards The irony is this It is the intellectual freedom of that once Christian university that allows Singer to attack its underpinnings Peter Singer's destructive and stubborn ideas would sweep away Western legal traditions that have evolved over centuries they would overturn moral refinements attained as a result of Western culture's embrace of the sanctity of human life In his world view a pig is more valuable than a disabled newborn infant a chimpanzee more valuable than a Down's child To Singer these human lives are to use a Nazi term useless eaters Twenty years ago Peter Singer wrote an article for the prestigious magazine Pediatrics He attacked the sanctity of life view as religious mumbo jumbo He said in part The philosophical foundations of this view have been knocked asunder SPRING 2003 81

MARK PICKUP We no longer base our ethics on the idea that human beings are a special form ofcreation made in the image ofGod singled out from all other animals and alone possessing an immortal soul 2 Singer has even proposed conducting medical experiments on comatose people for research purposes rather than using animals 3 He is dangerous because he is good company He is provocative and engaging with easy scholarly detachment he makes the most odious and brutal ideas palatable For more than twenty years he has been doing his considerable best to knock asunder the foundations of the sanctity oflife view I believe Harriet McBryde Johnson's atheism blinds her to the dangers this poses to her and to all other disabled people She could have reminded the New York Times readership of the great moral principles laid down by Thomas Jefferson Benjamin Franklin John Witherspoon and other American Founders in the Declaration of Independence She could have used its principle of the equality of human life as a rallying cry to the millions of people of good will who saw the New York Times Magazine article But the moral principles which made America great have as their foundation the Judeo Christian tradition And that would be unspeakable conversation indeed for a good atheist NOTES 1 See interview with Peter Singer Living and Dying in Psychology Today January 1999 Taken from Internet 28 March 2003 http www findarticles com cf O ml175 1 32 53479124 p3 article jhtml term 2 Singer Sanctity of Life or Quality of Life Pediatrics July 1983 pp 128 129 3 Living and Dying 82 SPRING 2003

ADVOCACY-JUJITSU

Advocacy jujitsu Wesley J Smith We live in the age of the moral outlaw Flouters of traditional morality ethical rule breakers even outright criminals are some of our most famous and celebrated citizens In contrast those who serve humanity selflesslywhether because of religious values the belief in the sanctity and the equality of human life or simply a kind and good heart remain generally little known and largely unheralded Mother Teresa is the rare exception not the rule If you think I am overstating the case take this little test Who is more famous Jack Kevorkian or Cecily Saunders Both are public personalities Both are medical doctors Both are associated with issues involving the suffering of dying people Both have communicated their views widely in books and public forums Yet Kevorkian the moral outlaw is almost universally known while I am willing to bet that relatively few people have ever heard of Saunders In a better world the exact reverse would be true Saunders was one of the greatest humanitarians of the 20th century As conceiver and founder of the modem hospice movement she is responsible for alleviating depths of suffering that cannot be measured The fIrst modem hospice opened in London in 1967 and the movement spread from there around the world Because of Saunders's dedication and indomitable energy people dying from even the most painful diseases have the opportunity to die in comfort and peace surrounded by a caring and loving community In contrast what has Kevorkian's assisted suicide campaign contributed to the betterment of the world For eight years he thumbed his nose at the law and at Hippocratic medical values as he helped kill more than 130 people whose names Dr Compassion once said he could not even recall More than 90 of his victims were not terminally ill and five according to their autopsies weren't even sick On one occasion he ripped out the kidneys of one of his disabled patients after the suicide offering the organs to the world first come fIrst served Kevorkian deserved calumny Instead he received world fame He became an A list media darling appearing as a guest of honor at Time magazine's 75th anniversary party where the mega movie star Tom Cruise Weslley J mn lln a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute is the author of Culture ofDeath The Assault on Medical Ethics in America Encounter Books and Forced Exit The Slippery Slope From Assisted Suicide to Legalized Murder Spence SPRING 2003 83

WESLEY 1 SMITH ran up excitedly to shake his hand Kevorkian's notoriety is not a fluke Dr Ira Byock hospice physician and author of the splendid Dying Well The Prospect for Growth at the End of Life told me a few years ago of being invited to debate suicide guru Derek Humphry in Florida Byock as head of the Missoula Demonstration Project of the Life's End Institute is one of the most prominent researchers into improving end of life care In contrast Humphry came to public prominence by assisting his first wife to commit suicide and then writing a book about it He soon learned that moral outlawry pays Humphry's how to commitsuicide guide Final Exit became a New York Times best seller After the debate Byock recalled the press rushed to the dais to ask questions rushed past Byock that is and excitedly surrounded the moral outlaw Humphry in search of juicy quotes Byock was ignored despite the fact that by any responsible measure it was he and not Humphry who could have provided useful infonnation to the reporters readers and viewers news they could really use about how to get high quality end of life care Now consider Peter Singer He too is a media magnet and proud moral outlaw Indeed as the father ofradical animal rights ideology and the world's foremost proponent of legalizing and legitimizing infanticide Singer is world famous precisely because he wages implacable war against Judeo Christianity and the belief in human uniqueness and the sanctity and equality of human life True Singer's obvious talents as a writer and public speaker contributed greatly to his success But can anyone say with a straight face that had he applied these same prodigious gifts to promoting religion and the sanctity of life he would be as well known throughout the world It is in this Through the Looking Glass environment that we must judge the propriety and usefulness of Harriet McBryde Johnson's Unspeakable Conversations It is remarkable that a strong anti euthanasia message appeared in a mainstream media outlet with the prestige and influence of the New York Times Magazine Better yet the anti euthanasia spokesperson was the star of the piece a vivid presence in all her three dimensional human glory This is quite a change from the usual media treatment received by opponents of the right to die More often than not the presentation of our perspective is limited to terse quotes provided for balance in pro assisted suicide articles in which we may be depicted as tight lipped naysayers who have little empathy for the dying or understanding of human suffering So why the big change Why did the editors of the New York Times Magazine not only publish Johnson's article but make it a cover story I believe it was because Johnson's article can be construed as defending Peter Singer Rather than being the monster she expected Singer is described 84 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW as being kind and courteous He doesn't avert his eyes from Johnson because of her disability His intellect is so formidable his approach so seemingly pure that she is emotionally disanned Even as I am horrified by what he says and by the fact that I have been sucked into a civil discussion of whether I ought to exist she writes I can't help being dazzled by his verbal facility He is so respectful so free of condescension so focused on the argument that by the time the show is over I'm not exactly angry at him Indeed Johnson is so smitten with Singer's persona that after his public lecture in her hometown of Charleston she transfers her fury at Singer's views to the audience that listened to Singer's arguments with polite interest when in decency they should have run him out of town on a rail This point is highly ironic given that Johnson is the one who in the Q A following his talk had the polite and courteous public exchange with Singerwhich she then followed with an equally polite civil and respectful highprofile article No wonder the article was embraced by the editors of the New York Times llJ oes all of this mean that Johnson should not have written the article Absolutely not Did she do more hann than good To the contrary No hann was done and potentially significant benefits were achieved This is the bottom line Johnson used Singer to send a powerful antieuthanasia and pro disability rights message in much the same way that scientists harness the force of planetary gravity to keep satellites orbiting the earth Without Singer's looming presence the article never would have been published Had Johnson ranted and raved that Singer was the devil incarnate the article never would have been published Had the article never been published the many thousands of people who read the piece might never have considered the ultimate inhumanity of Singer's views which Johnson ably reveals lurking just beneath his genteel surface But didn't her article legitimize Singer and help spread his views Not really His views already receive tremendous coverage both through the publication of his own writing and through the ubiquitous reportage of his activities As for legitimizing him well legitimacy is a hard thing to define but my sense is that like it or not he is already legitimate This is upsetting I know And I wish it weren't true But Singer if not yet mainstream is certainly no longer fringe Many consider his views to be eminently worthy ofrespectful consideration No doubt Johnson sensed this Why else would she have felt compelled to engage Singer in courteous debate about a question as odious as whether people such as herself ought to exist Indeed it is because of his views not in spite of them that Singer SPRING 2003 85

WESLEy J SMITH is a tenured professor at Princeton University It is because of what he believes that his books have become commonly used in university and college philosophy courses It is because his perspectives and insights are in demand that he travels the world lecturing and is the frequent subject of highprofile media interviews Good grief he wrote the essay on ethics for the Encyclopedia Britannica If that isn't legitimate I don't know what is So let's face some hard facts We who resist the views of Peter Singer may be the ones who should worry about public legitimacy We are the ones depicted in the popular media as being out of step We are the ones whose views are often ridiculed in our most prestigious universities Our perspectives are the ones that are virtually invisible in the popular culture Too often this means that defenders of the sanctity and intrinsic equality of human life are left preaching to the choir On those relatively rare occasions when we are asked to appear in front of general audiences we may speak to more empty seats than people In such a cultural atmosphere not only is there little to lose by using the popularity of the moral outlaw as a means to further our ends which is what I think Johnson did but there may be much to gain This was precisely the approach taken last year by the Center for Bioethics and the Culture CBC a think tank located in Oakland California I work frequently with the organization as a special consultant Its mission is to facilitate the integration of traditional Judeo Christian values in bioethical decision making Since the CBC is a new organization and one based in the San Francisco Bay area not exactly a hotbed of sanctity of life activism one of its first priorities was to raise its public profile Toward this end the CBC decided upon a bold and unconventional strategy It invited and paid Peter Singer to publicly debate its executive chairman the Christian theologian Nigel Cameron When Jennifer Lahl founder and executive director of the eBC called and asked me what I thought of the idea I was taken aback I said that to pay him an honorarium would be to reward him for wounding the very ethical principles that the founders of the CBC were working so hard to defend Moreover I warned the debate would provide Singer with a platform from which to spread his noxious brand of utilitarianism perhaps to people who would otherwise remain unaware of it The decision makers at the CBC had considered those points Lahl told me but she believed there was another way to look at it Singer's notoriety would almost guarantee a large audience many or most of whom would already be familiar with Singer but might not otherwise ever hear the CBe's 86 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW side of the argument Moreover the debate might attract media attention perhaps opening doors to the CBC's views being presented in subsequent stories about bioethics related public controversies To put it bluntly the presence of Peter Singer could put the CBC on the map As Lahl now recalls her thinking at the time I was frustrated with the feeling that traditional views and values had become passe and old fashioned while extreme radical and even offensive views were in and thought to be enlightened And Xbelieved that by bringing Peter Singer to town specifically in a public debate format we would force the public to actually engage these issues in the hope that some would wake up to the public consequences that would follow if they were ever actually carried out Organizing the debate proved to be a stroke of brilliance Six to seven hundred people attended The disability rights community demonstrated against Singer providing a compelling condemnation of Singer's philosophy on other than religious grounds The media were attracted to the event bringing attention to the CBC that might have been otherwise unobtainable Videotapes of the Cameron Singer encounter have since been sent by the CBC to universities around the world Thanks in large part to the debate representatives of the CBC are now regularly approached by the media and Jennifer Labl is often interviewed on radio and television including on NPR We are now perceived as a serious organization Labl says And the debate was so successful we are in the midst of planning our next large scale public event a public forum The Face of the Future Technosapiens in which both sides of the geneticengineering debate will discuss the pros and cons of using biotechnology for the purpose of human custom design Those of us who stand against the Singer tide face daunting challenges The media tend to be biased against our perspectives Given that we don't have the moral outlaw's ability to make news we don't assist suicides we don't break the law we don't propose outrageous analogies such as cattle ranching being akin to chattel slavery we are generally stuck in the reactive mode Actually I am not sure whether this is cause or effect Our biggest problem may be that most people find it easier to whistle past the graveyard than to look clearly at the open grave that is the culture of death This cultural atmosphere presents us with tactical difficulties to be sure But with imagination they can be overcome So bravo to Harriet McBryde Johnson and Jennifer Lahl who with their clever advocacy jujitsu used the power and energy of the adversary to further their own laudable ends SPRING 2003 87

SINGER AND THE SONG

Singer and the Song Jo McGowan My thirteen year old daughter eats very little Moy Moy is nearly five feet tall and weighs only fifty six pounds For the last eight years Moy has been regressing Her developmental age is now that of a four month infant Part of her condition a neurological degenerative disorder is a slow dis coordination of the muscles needed to chew and swallow so that although she wants to eat the effort is simply too much for her His one of life's little ironies that I read the article about Professor Singer's encounter with Harriet McBryde Johnson this week while my husband and I are trying to decide whether the time has come for Moy to undergo a gastrostomy a surgical procedure to insert a tube directly into her stomach so that we can continue to feed her now that she can no longer feed herself Professor Singer would have no trouble making the decision Or so he thinks Professor Singer doesn't know Moy Moy Based on the facts she cannot walk or speak or do anything whatever for herself and she seems to have no self awareness she would probably qualify for his definition of a waste of space Our taking care of her is in his words a little weird But as I say he doesn't know h r He couldn't guess that her presence in our lives has transformed us that she has brought us close to people we would never have known and now cannot think of life without He couldn't imagine her magnetic charm her delightful adorable nature He couldn't know that because of her a school has been created in India which takes care of the needs of hundreds of children with special needs employs nearly forty people generates millions of rupees in donations and creates awareness and a sense of community in a way that no ordinary school ever could She is a mini Empire all on her own He also didn't know Shivani one ofMoy Moy's classmates Shivani died last month of starvation brought on by depression Shivani had a severe mental and emotional disability Her behaviour was erratic and often violent and she created chaos in her family They were very poor and a year earlier her father an unemployed tailor also suffering from depression had committed suicide Shivani was deeply attached to him and had been unable to adjust to life without him She stopped eating gradually and slowly wasted away Jo McGowan is a columnist for Commonweal magazine She and her family live in Dehra Doon India where she has founded Karuna Vihar a school for children with special needs 88 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REVIEW I tell both stories to make the point that as Ms Johnson insists disabled lives are not subject to debate Moy Moy is beautiful easy and appealing and well off while Shivani was beautiful intensely difficult and poor neither of them however need to justify their right to exist to Professor Singer any more than he needs to justify his to me His views offend me but I don't plan to suggest he be killed because he holds them In spite of his intelligence Professor Singer has a limited understanding of the world and it seems little imagination He has no idea of what the world would be like without Moy Moy and Shivani None of us does really but those of us who like me once had only a peripheral understanding of disability and now have it as the centre of their existence can testify to the before and after phenomenon with some authority My own quality of life has improved dramatically since Moy Moy's birth and not only because of the difference she herself has made to me but also because of the many other people with disabilities I have met through her I live differently now I think I am a better person I agree with Ms Johnson that people with disabilities are not here to provide awareness training to the rest of us They are not here to inspire anything either not love not a sense of gratitude Like the rest of us they are just here But also like the rest of us sometimes their presence does inspire love gratitude generosity kindness I do not think I am being sentimental when I say that people with disabilities inspire on average more than people without I have worked in the field of special needs now for nearly a decade It used to amaze me that in every institution I visited without exception I would find a collection of truly wonderful people Now I take it for granted While I admit that the profession attracts a certain type of person in the first place it is also true that many character traits develop only through practice People who make a habit of accepting others as they are of valuing their efforts and championing their smallest achievements become people of depth and understanding The world would be a poorer place without them In a recent column Professor Singer says that he is not surprised by Catholic opposition to voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide because Roman Catholicism is authoritarian discouraging critical thinking in its followers Starting from the position that God has put us here on earth for a purpose they see suicide as something like desertion from the military except that the suicide is disobeying orders from the Supreme Commander Voluntary euthanasia they regard as even worse than suicide since it involves the intentional killing of an innocent human being 1 Whether I agree with his analysis of Catholic opposition or not his criticism is a valid one Many of SPRING 2003 89

Jo MCGOWAN us do accept the teachings of the Church uncritically and it does no one any service As a Catholic I accept Singer's observation as a challenge to examine the assumptions I make without even knowing I am making them We all need to be called to account to give reasons for things we profess In the same spirit I challenge Professor Singer to look at his own assumptions The moral validity of choosing abortion is a case in point Abortion in some circles is such a sacred cow that it is difficult to honestly consider any proposal that questions its legitimacy And if we accept abortion as Profes sor Singer rightly points out there is no reason not to accept infanticide It's what we have been saying from the very beginning The problem here is in Professor Singer's assumption that the argument for abortion is so perfect as to admit of no further debate This is far from being the case As it happens however I don't actually worry too much about Professor Singer's views Whatever his reasons for propounding them making his name in the world a taste for controversy a desire for excitement when it came to the test he couldn't practice them himself His own mother who was by all accounts a brilliantly intellectual woman and a physician with an active practice has Alzheimer's In spite of her expressed wish not to be allowed to live in such a state should it ever come to that Singer has not had her done away with Instead he spends large sums of money providing her with round the clock nursing care unassisted by Kevorkian or any of his colleagues However he justifies it in his own mind he says I think this had made me see how the issues of someone with these kinds of problems are really very difficult Perhaps it's more difficult than I thought before because it's different when it's your mother 2 Singer cannot deny his generosity his love or his humanity Professor Singer is obviously a man of great sensitivity he cares about his mother about animals and about the environment It seems inconceivable that he would not consider the possible consequences of his proposal to do away with handicapped infants born or unborn I would like to invite him to forget the fact that the lives we are discussing are human and simply think of them as mammals As he well knows ecosystems are nothing if not interdependent The slightest disruption can have far reaching and often disastrous effects Usually these effects are things we would never have guessed In the Redwood forests of California for example large scale logging operations created havoc with the natural habitat of the spotted owl The 90 SPRING 2003

THE HUMAN LIFE REvIEW spotted owl is what is known as a keystone species an organism which plays a crucial role in its environment and whose removal results in massive ecological damage As logging in the Redwoods continued and the spotted owl population declined rodents increased upsetting the delicate balance of the forest ecosystem and causing a ripple effect of destruction to other creatures and plant life An interesting sidelight to this particular conservationist vs big business battle is that the spotted owl's habitat is also the home ofthe Pacific yew a tree whose bark may hold the cure for ovarian breast and lung cancer Had conservationists not won the day for the owls this potentially life saving discovery for humans might never have been made 3 A more elegant example if disabled babies are spotted owls that makes Peter Singer a rodent are the lichens colonizing organisms which so enrich the soil that given their presence even areas devastated by volcanic ash can eventually support life Lichens are astonishing they do not require nitrogen in the soil because they can get it from the atmosphere Their fungus rots what biological matter there is manufacturing the phosphorous that plants need to grow they also hasten the disintegration of rock yielding valuable nutrients in the process Lichens are enormously important in arctic ecosystems and their destruction could have immense and catastrophic ecological impact 4 One of the interesting things about keystone species is their seeming insignificance to the unknowing eye Spotted owls and lichens forsooth But it should come as no surprise The stone which the builders rejected became the cornerstone Children with disabilities enrich our lives in ways we cannot begin to fathom Those of us lucky enough to be ecologists in this particular ecosystem can make grateful lists of rocks they have disintegrated and nitrogen they have created from thin air the rest including Professor Singer will have to take our word for it These spotted owls are too important to do without We don't even know half of what we would be missing if they were not with us Life is wonderful and unpredictable and full of surprising twists and turns Intellectual capacity and self awareness are very well in their way but they are not the beginning and the end Brine shrimp an endangered species whose habitat happened to be in the proposed path of a major railways project in California were considered important enough that the railway was re routed No one was quite sure what might happen if they were eliminated and that doubt was what saved them Hooray for the conservative caution that errs on the side of life and SPRING 2003 91

Jo MCGOWAN possibility Three cheers for the brine shrimp who just might be another keystone species And let's hear it for babies like Moy Moy about whom there is no doubt whatsoever Damn everything but the circus S NOTES 1 Free Enquiry 22 2 2002 2 Interview by Michael Specter in The New Yorker September 6 1999 3 The Green Fuse An Ecological Odyssey by John Harte University of Califomia Press Berkeley 1993 pp 93 94 4 Ibid p 23 5 e e cummings The author Jo McGowan and her family standing husband Ravi Chopra children Anand and Cathleen seated mother in law Karuna Chopra Jo and daughter Moy Moy 92 SPRING 2003

Announcing 0 0 0 A Specialli JEvel11l'fc JAMES 1PATRICK MCfADDEN The Human Life Foundation will host a fundraising dinner to support the Human Life Review on Friday October 17 2003 at the Union League Club in New York City The date marks the fifth anniversary of the death of our founding editor J P McFadden We can think of no better way to honor his memory than by fostering support for the Review which is his legacy We hope you will consider joining us for this special evening William F Buckley Jr will present a Great Defender of Life Award to the Honorable Henry J Hyde a friend of Mr McFadden's and a great friend of the unborn Others who will toast the Review include Edward A Capano Nat Hentoff Monsignor Eugene Clark Michael Uhlmann and Mary Ward For more information please contact us at 212 685 5210 Individual Tickets 200 Sponsor Table listed in program 2,000 Benfactor Table listed in program 5,000

APPENDICES

232 people have visited this page. 1 have visited this page today.

Use your keyboard's arrow keys or the arrow buttons on either side of the pages to browse this issue in depth. Click on any page to zoom in, and click again or press "ESC" on your keyboard to zoom out. Not what you're looking for? Return home or search for an article using the box below: