Is Your Body Yours? Executive Body Snatchers

The Terri Schiavo case is a microcosm of today's America. Within the confines of this single affair there plays out the struggle between the executive and judicial branches of government, the struggle between the religious and the secular, and the struggle between those who know best for others and those who want to be left alone.

The fact that President Bush and Governor Bush tried to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case is very telling as to how the religious rights wants to proceed. Clearly everyone knows that this is a court matter – a dispute between the husband and the parents regarding the existence of Mrs. Schiavo. The religious right, however, has another view. To these people God demands the maintenance of life at all cost – regardless of whether that person is really alive in any sense of the word. But since God does not talk to ordinary people like me I assume that the religious right really wants to have power over a person’s right to decide how to end their life. Look what happened to Dr. Kevorkian in Michigan – he’s still rotting away in a jail for answering the cries of people in agony who wanted help with dying.

The problem with this mentality is that if there is no right to your own body then there is no right to own your life either. A right is a moral concept that defines and sanctions “a man’s freedom of action in a social context” and the one fundamental right is a man’s right to his own life. That does not mean only the part of his life where he is acting to maintain his life it also means the part where he no longer wants to maintain his life.

Human beings have rights because of the nature of our species. Since we have to think every second of the day in order to figure out how to live (versus an animal who acts on instincts) we have to have the right to own our life and our bodies.

So it appears to me that the Schiavo case is a first step for the religious right toward earlier control of our lives. If we cannot control the ending of our lives why should we be able to control when and if we want to make a new life. The religious right believes that a bunch of cells is a human being just because it has the correct configuration of chromosomes. They would willingly condemn a woman to 20 years of hard labor raising a child she does not want. That is the real agenda of these people.

And that my friend is what we have to stand up and fight for: the freedom to determine how each person decides to use her body. This fight of course is a philosophical battle, that is, it is a battle of ideas and the battle lines are drawn: On the one side there is tyranny (the executive body snatchers) on the other side there is freedom. But isn’t that the battle individuals have been fighting for centuries? It’s just in a new form.