Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from December 17, 2006
I was reading Reason magazine online yesterday, and it made me mad. (Reason magazine is published by people who call themselves "libertarians"--advocates of largely unregulated capitalism, personal liberty, and a radically smaller federal government.) I don't disagree with Reason much, as my friends know. But this opinion concerned Terri Schiavo. You remember her, the severely disabled Florida woman who was at the center of a battle to remove her feeding tube, because she was allegedly brain-dead. I saw video footage of Terri--some current, some from several years back. I can't escape my initial reaction: "She looks alive to me." And I can't see the argument that she wasn't alive, nor that her 'quality of life' was so poor that we're saving her and ourselves pain and trouble by ending her life. I thought the Roman Catholic teaching on life and death was especially on-point here--embodied in a homily by (I think) the Archbishop of Denver,