Orson Scott Card on the Schiavo case

This is an outstanding commentary, by the father of a severely disabled boy who lived only until he was 17. His passion on this issue is palpable, and I strongly recommend reading the whole thing.

[W]e now live in a country where you can kill your wife, as long as she’s tragically brain-damaged, lying in a hospital bed, unable to speak. She does open her eyes, though. And she can track objects that move across her field of vision. She isn’t in a coma. She even has people who want to take care of her. Her parents, her siblings. And pay no attention to the “experts” who say that these apparent signs of intelligent life aren’t real. We once had an “expert” make the same sort of declaration about our son Charlie, after a mere half hour of observation, completely discounting the experience of Charlie’s parents and other caretakers who knew perfectly well that he really communicated with us. The expert’s assumption was that anything seen through the eyes of people who loved Charlie was to be discounted completely. Ironically, though, it is precisely the people whose attention is concentrated by love who are best equipped to judge whether communication is happening — since it is happening with them.

...

We cannot get inside the head of someone else even when they can speak. So to take the life of someone based on speculation about what they “would have wanted” is arrogant at best, monstrous at worst. So what if she might have said at one time, “I wouldn’t want to live like that”? She was only speculating herself at that time, guessing at how she would feel. How many times have you ever said, “If that ever happens to me, then I hope you’ll just kill me”? Even people suffering from such dark depression that they say they want to die — who is to say that at some later time they might have a completely different desire? But once they’re dead, they can’t change their mind. We can’t prevent death indefinitely — it comes to everyone in the end...But when we can preserve a life, how dare we not do our best to do so? Not just for the sake of that particular life, but for the sake of all the others who will be murdered once we open the floodgates and allow selfish people to kill those helpless ones who inconvenience them.