To Be Or Not To Be A Person
By LAWRENCE P. GRAYSON
“The Doctor Will Kill You Now.” This chapter heading in Ramesh Ponnuru’s book, The Party of Death, reflects the chilling view of a detached, business-like, dystopian society. It also is a prescient and ominous description of an expanding culture of death.
Procured human extermination, whether at the beginning of life or at its end, is becoming socially acceptable and more commonplace. A clinic in Maryland is attempting to make abortion chic. Its facility resembles a high-end salon with wood floors, plush upholstery and attractive pictures on the walls; its clients are offered hot tea and soft robes as they wait to have their children killed. The now-defunct Dalton Books chain once categorized a book on how to commit suicide under the heading: “Self-Improvement.” In the Netherlands, there now are traveling teams of euthanizers to dispatch the elderly, the feeble, the lonely, and the terminally ill.
Proponents of a culture of death try to blur the knowledge of when life begins and when it ends so that they can more readily justify abortion and euthanasia. Through philosophic arguments and euphemistic terms, they salve their consciences as they legally rid themselves of the disruption of an unwanted pregnancy or the hardship of caring for the terminally ill, the severely disabled, the permanently comatose, and those with extreme cognitive impairment.
A convenient approach to confound the issue is to separate the notion of person from that of human life by conferring personhood only if an individual possesses certain functional capabilities. If those capabilities are missing or do not meet a given norm, the individual is considered a non-person and not entitled to rights granted to others. Specifically, the right to life, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, does not apply to them.
This attempt to depersonalize classes of individuals runs counter to the religious beliefs that humans have spiritual souls, as well as physical bodies, and that their souls are created in the image and likeness of God. All human life, from conception until natural death, has a worth and dignity simply by being human. As God given, the right to life is intrinsic and inalienable, and does not depend on the quality of that life being up to a certain functional norm. No one has the authority to take the life of another or to discard his own.
When life begins is a biological fact. It is indisputably at conception, when the male and female components unite to create a new living organism with a complete genetic identity of a human being that is distinct from either parent. The point at which that life is considered to be a person, in contrast, is a social and philosophical construct. The separation of the two is nothing more than a sophistic attempt to justify the taking of innocent life. If the organism in the womb is not a person, then abortion — even to the point of partial birth — is not recognized as the killing of a child, but only as the medical excision of a growth, tissues, or cells within a woman.
In the United States, this Jesuitic distinction has allowed over 58 million children never-to-be-born since Roe v. Wade was passed in 1973.
The separation of personhood from life is fraught with danger for everyone at every stage of life. The point of partition becomes a decision of those in power, whether a dictator, autocrat, or a democratic majority. When a human is declared a non-person because of his or her inability to sustain life independently of others or is not able to perform at a certain level of mental, physical, or social ability, the individual is considered to be a thing without the dignity, worth, or rights of a person.
This can lead, and has led, to great atrocities. At various times, in many countries, in differing circumstances, slaves, blacks, gypsies, Jews, nonbelievers, and other “inconvenient” groups have been declared non-persons — or at least treated as such — thus justifying lynching, slavery, ethnic cleansing, genocide, gulags, jihad, and the Holocaust.
The issue of personhood was central to the decision to withhold nutrition and hydration from Terri Schiavo and starve her to death. Since she was in a prolonged vegetative state and could not perform as a human being, she was considered “dead” as a person and her life functions ended. Would American society allow a mass-killer on death row to be starved to death? Do we as a nation truly believe that a life is not valuable nor worth living if the individual is in a persistent vegetative state? If so, do we hold the same for a person who is in a long-term coma, is severely handicapped, has advanced dementia, is extremely autistic, cannot live without constant pain, or has a genetic defect?
The life of a human being follows a continuous evolution: from a fertilized egg or zygote to blastocyst to embryo to fetus to newborn, and then through childhood, young adulthood, middle age, and finally elderliness. Similarly, at each of those stages, the physical and mental capacities of an individual can vary along a continuum.
Where along these unbroken chains are the lines to be drawn separating persons from non-persons, segregating lives worth living from those that are not? Who is to draw them? And once drawn, can they not be moved in the future to define new groups of non-people?
If we accept a functional view of a person, what will be the next steps — partial-birth abortion, infanticide, mercy killing, genetic cleansing? What will be the future of this nation, as it moves further away from an absolute morality with regard to life to one that is relative? This nation would do well to remember the words of Pope John Paul II as he concluded his visit to the United States in 1987:
“Every human person — no matter how vulnerable or helpless, no matter how young or how old, no matter how healthy, handicapped, or sick, no matter how useful or productive for society — is a being of inestimable worth created in the image and likeness of God. This is the dignity of America, the reason she exists, the condition for her survival — yes, the ultimate test of her greatness: to respect every human person, especially the weakest and most defenseless ones, those as yet unborn.”
Let us strive to create a public consciousness that every life has value and worth. Let us demonstrate to our political leaders and the nation-at-large that abortion and euthanasia are heinous acts and that human life at all stages, from conception to natural death, must be respected. Let us develop a societal acknowledgment that ours is a nation under God.
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(The author is a visiting scholar in The School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.)