More on "The Seamless Garment Re-configured"

Nick Frankovich very kindly send me a note, clarifying (for me) his First Things post about which I blogged yesterday.  He writes:

. . . A common claim on the abortion-rights side is that parents who abort their child are acting in the child's interest. Amniocentesis has revealed, say, a severe abnormality, and the family is poor and dysfunctional. The child's life would be painful or degrading to him. The parents are exercising compassion and sound judgment when they decide to exercise for the unborn child his right to die. You and I might disagree, but it's not our child, they point out.

So far that argument may be more rhetorical than legal, but I think it does find support in the legal community. I say that because of the reaction to the Terri Schiavo case. Many of the details of that case are obviously different from those of an abortion case, but in its essentials the reasoning behind support for Schiavo's euthanasia is the same as the reasoning behind the abortion-rights argument I outlined in the paragraph above.

Here is someone who can't speak for herself. She has a right to die.  She also has a right to live. Which right should she choose? Someone has to make the decision for her, because she is incapable of expressing her own wish. The person to decide for her is -- fill in the blank. Most people think it should be a close family member -- spouse, parent, child -- rather than the state.

Now, the above paragraph works as an argument for abortion rights to the same degree that it worked as an argument for euthanasia in the case of Terri Schiavo. The link in the argument that is weak, in my opinion, is the assertion that "she has a right to die."

I happen to think that a person should be able to forgo heroic medical treatment and to choose hospice, although I wouldn't know how to formulate that right in such a way that people couldn't abuse it to abort their children or cut short their parents' life in assisted living or nursing care. Michael Schiavo claimed that Terri had once told him that she would want to die if she were so incapacitated, but, being unsubstantiated, his claim amounted to not much more than a parent saying "I know that under these conditions my baby would rather be aborted than be born."

I'm aware that, strictly defined, the legal basis for abortion rights doesn't cover the right to die or the right to be aborted.  But I don't think abortion rights can enjoy practical, political support unless they're grounded in this substrate of belief about the right to die. . . .

Again, I'm grateful for the note.  A few thoughts:  First, I think that the pro-choice argument outlined in the first paragraph (i.e., "I'm having this abortion for the sake of, and for the good of, the baby, who is facing an uphappy life due to his / her disability") is not, really, one that does much work -- some, yes, but not that much -- on the pro-choice side of things.  It seems to me that the basic pro-choice argument is "I do not want to have a child, and it is my right to be able to act on this not-want."  That is, the paradigmatic pro-choice argument is not, it seems to me, one in which the "proxy for the unborn child's right to die" idea is all that salient.

I also think -- and maybe I'm being naive -- that there is (the Schiavo case notwithstanding) more distance than Nick suggests between the argument that one has a right to refuse unwanted medical treatment and the argument that one has a right to abortion or the argument that euthanasia is morally permissible.

My sense -- which points me in the opposite direction Nick is travelling -- is that the "right to die" feeds on the "right to abort", and its "autonomy" premises, and not the other way around.

What do others think?