Is Terri Schiavo soylent green?

It appears that the spirit of Josef Mengele is alive and well. From a debate between Wesley Smith and Bill Allen held on March 24, 2005:

Wesley Smith: Bill, do you think Terri is a person?

Bill Allen: No, I do not. I think having awareness is an essential criterion for personhood. Even minimal awareness would support some criterion of personhood, but I don't think complete absence of awareness does.

I worked for two years at a residential center for severely mentally and physically handicapped adults, many of whom couldn't feed themselves, and had no means of verbal communication. Some of them would have made the present-day Terri Schiavo look like a Harvard professor. But I loved working with those people. They showed me humility, and they showed me that every human being is deserving of dignity.

In the elementary school that I work at, I worked with a 10-year old girl named Megan. Megan was profoundly mentally retarded and had spina bifida. Megan was wheelchair bound, microcephalic, and needed to be tube fed. She oftentimes suffered from respiratory distress, and one could always hear her wheezing. There was one thing that Megan was noted for. Her smile. Even through her sufferings, through her respiratory distress, Megan smiled one of the most contagious smiles I have ever seen. She delighted at the simple pleasures of life, such as sunlight beaming on her face through the skylights of the elementary school. Though her awareness was intermittent at best, Megan knew how to love. She touched so many people with her simple acceptance of her plight. When Megan was born, the doctors gave her perhaps a year to live, but at every turn Megan proved them wrong. Megan finally did die at the age of 10, from complications due to respiratory distress. Over 450 people (this is in a rural area) showed up for Megan's funeral. Megan's life was a life that stated in no uncertain terms: every life has purpose; every life has meaning.

That fact is somehow lost on our more "enlightened" bioethicists:

So who are the so-called human non-persons? All embryos and fetuses, to be sure. But many bioethicists also categorize newborn infants as human non-persons (although some bioethicists refer to healthy newborns as “potential persons”). So too are those with profound cognitive impairments such as Terri Schiavo and President Ronald Reagan during the latter stages of his Alzheimer’s disease.

Personhood theory would reduce some of us into killable and harvestable people. Harris wrote explicitly that killing human non-persons would be fine because “Non-persons or potential persons cannot be wronged” by being killed “because death does not deprive them of something they can value. If they cannot wish to live, they cannot have that wish frustrated by being killed.”

Yes, Josef Mengele would indeed be proud!




After all, undesireables like Jews weren't really deserving of personhood either, were they?

History repeats itself. These types of monsters have been around since time immemoriam. The Terri Schiavo case has merely brought them out of the woodwork, circling around Terri as her life dwindles, making their case for their macabre , twisted and unholy view of creation shared by such luminaries as Mengele, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao and Stalin. History does repeat itself, dear readers. Make no mistake about it. And don't think we're immune to it.