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Not up to human beings to end even vegetative life
The query of Mr. Rene Q. Bas (ENTHUSIASMS &
FOREBODINGS, “Would you do a Michael Schiavo to your wife?” The
Manila Times July 14, 2008) is a 64-million dollar question which, I
doubt if any deeply conscientious human being can readily answer
with a simple “yes” or “no” without weighing in the moral,
social, and religious implications.
A human life is God-given. Regardless of the
vegetative state that a life may be in, and as long as there is a
whisper of breath coming from that life, who is to say that it has
reached its end and must therefore be terminated? What right does
one have over another in determining the fate of a vegetative life
hooked up to a machine? Who is to say that it’s up to another
human being to decide when that life should end?
True, a life that’s barely hanging on to a
thread of existence, as in the case of a severely comatose person
sustained by a life support machine, might beg for mercy to end its
sufferings if only that life could speak for itself. But, even if
there is clearly a reason to arbitrarily end that suffering, at what
point do you draw the line—if there is, in fact, a line to be
drawn at all—in choosing death over life for a helpless human
being? At what point does one, if at all, play God and say “let
this life end here and now?”
Given that there have been cases of miraculous
recoveries after years in comatose condition, albeit few and far
between, playing the Michael Schiavo card—to end a life at a
stroke of a pen—makes the act excruciatingly questionable if not
dead wrong. In fact, in the Michael Schiavo case, there were some
questions asked regarding his real motive in taking his wife off a
life support machine because it’s been reported that he had, for
years, been living with another woman he could not obviously marry
legally while his wife was still living.
Would I play Michael Schiavo to my wife? There
are those who would find it easy enough to say that a life’s
vegetative condition, medically deemed irreversible, is not worth
keeping alive through the use of artificial means. May God forbid so
that I may never have to cross that bridge someday but, should fate
make it happen anyway, I know I’ll settle with my conscience’s
firm belief that “what God had given, only God can take away.”
Juanito T. Fuerte
JTFuerte@aol.com
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