response to Lauritzen on the Terri Schiavo case

I have to confess that I didn't find the essay by Paul Lauritzen on the Terri Schiavo case very convincing. His main point is that the withdrawal of food and water didn't run afoul of Catholic teaching because the withdrawal didn't necessarily aim at death. Rather, Lauritzen claims, we are adopting a "let nature take its course" position and refusing to worship the false gods of technology in pursuit of "mere existence."

Putting aside the point that the providing food and water does not involve the use of high-tech care, I don't think this is a sound argument. Lauritzen claims that people such as Terri are in fact dying because of their natural inability to chew and swallow. We don't apply this way of thinking to most people in a state of dependency (infants who have a natural inability to feed themselves). As Bill May and others have pointed out patients in a persistent vegetative state are "not in fact dying from a fatal pathology. They are simply persons seriously impaired." The "problem" is that they are "biologically tenacious"--that is, they won't die soon enough, and that is precisely the aim of the withdrawal of food and water. Courts make this error all the time. The Florida courts in the Estelle Browning thought her death was "imminent" because she'd die within a short time without food and water. I think a reading of Lauritzen's essay makes clear that he doesn't think the lives of such patients are worth very much, or perhaps not worth anything at all. He explicitly denies this but I don't think the full essay supports his denial.

A better treatment of this issue is Mark Latkovic's fine article in volume 5 (pages 503-513) of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Autumn 2005).

Richard