Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 1, 1990 TAG: 9007020260
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: C-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The court ruled that state laws in Ohio and Minnesota requiring parental notification before minor girls seek abortions are constitutional, as is a Missouri law which prohibits the removal of a feeding tube from a comatose patient whose wishes concerning the termination of her life are not clear.
Reduced to their lowest common denominator, the parental-notification provisions were allowed primarily because of the judicial bypass provision. The court said that the final authority shall not be the parents of a minor child. It will be the courts. And what will the court's authority be? Whatever the Supreme Court dictates.
In the case of Nancy Cruzan, the comatose woman whose parents sought to remove her feeding tube, thus effectively starving her to death, the court said that while Cruzan has a constitutional right to refuse treatment, she did not make her wishes sufficiently known prior to the accident which left her in a "vegetative" state. The states are free to draw up living wills and other "right to die" legislation that will record people's wishes in advance of potential illness or injury.
The problem with these is that while it is easy to philosophize in good health concerning steps to be taken should an incapacitating illness or injury occur, there is no way one can say with certainty how one would feel once actually confronted with the situation. Nor is it possible to judge the motives of possibly greedy relatives who might be all too happy to shuffle their relatives off to the next world in order to collect on the insurance and inheritance.
Both the abortion and the Cruzan decisions were amoral, legal gobbledygook. Only Justice Antonin Scalia approached the truth when he wrote in a concurring opinion in the abortion cases, "The random and unpredictable results of our consequently unchanneled views make it increasingly evident, term after term, that the tools for this job are not to be found in the lawyer's - and hence not the judge's - workbox. I continue to dissent from this enterprise of devising an Abortion Code, and from the illusion that we have authority to do so."
The unanswered question in these cases is: What is the value of the lives that are being considered? Decisions increasingly are to be made on presumed "rights," though no one ever says where such rights come from.
As University of Chicago Professor Leon Kass writes in the March issue of Commentary magazine, "It is now fashionable, in many aspects of public life, to demand what one wants or needs as a matter of rights. How to do the right thing gets translated into a right to get or do your own thing."
From a fundamental right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," which were said to be "endowed by our Creator," and therefore "unalienable," we have regressed to a right to die and a right to cause unborn babies to die so that we might jettison our burdens. Where do these rights come from? They come from the courts, which may add, subtract, multiply or divide them at their whim.
Since rights are now assigned rather than recognized as pre-existing, this has led to conflict between competing interests. The courts have become lost in a litigious jungle without a moral or legal compass to find their way out.
Again, Kass restores the intellectual and moral foundation to the debate when he writes, "For it is precisely the setting of fixed limits on violating human life that makes possible our efforts at dignified relations with our fellow men, especially when their neediness and disability try our patience. We will never be able to relate decently to people if we are entitled to consider that one option before us is to make them dead."
In the rush to preserve the "dignity" of those we want to help to kill, we diminish our own dignity in the process. The courts have been willing participants in this self-deception.
While some may take heart that last week's decisions by the Supreme Court do not advance the cause of the pro-abortion lobby, the court has neither restored a fundamental recognition of where life rights come from nor taken its position as life's steward rather than life's giver and taker away. Until that day comes, everyone is a potential victim. Los Angeles Times Syndicate
by CNB