On that particular situation, I'd disagree with you, in the sense that Ms. Schiavo, while she might have been disabled, was certainly alive, and what the spouse wanted permission to do was to accelerate her death, not allow her to die a natural death. Depriving her of food and water was to my mind inhumane, and she should have been allowed to be a ward of the state, if not her parents. It does appear to me that his motivations were at least in part financial, and I believe the state should have a vested interest in intervening when family members choose to end life for financial reasons.
I think this is likely the crux of our fundamental disagreement. What constitutes human life? Is it just the right DNA, no matter how it is packaged?
Terri Schiavo was not just disabled. Her brain had been permanently damaged, in a way that would disallow any "Terri" to still be there. Her body was a shell. To me, this is, indeed, deification of "life" - her body had to be maintained, like an empty shell, a shrine?? Terri was not there. Whatever made Terri be Terri was not there. Whatever makes us "human" was no longer there, just like it is not there for a blastocyst.
I disagree that this constitutes reverence for life. To me, reverence for life would seem to include a willingness to recognize when life is gone, and it's time to let it go. To be brutally frank, to keep Terri's body alive in that way seems almost obscene to me.
If you have not read Carl Sagan's essay on abortion, I wish you would. This is the very issue he deals with, because reality is that most people who oppose abortion aren't seeking to protect all animal life, but rather seeking to protect HUMAN life. So what is it that makes us human?
http://www.2think.org/abortion.shtmlThere is no right to life in any society on Earth today, nor has there been at any former time… : We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; kill deer and elk for sport, leopards for the pelts, and whales for fertilizer; entrap dolphins, gasping and writhing, in great tuna nets; club seal pups to death; and render a species extinct every day. All these beasts and vegetables are as alive as we. What is (allegedly) protected is not life, but human life.
And even with that protection, casual murder is an urban commonplace, and we wage “conventional” wars with tolls so terrible that we are, most of us, afraid to consider them very deeply… That protection, that right to life, eludes the 40,000 children under five who die on our planet each day from preventable starvation, dehydration, disease, and neglect.
Those who assert a "right to life" are for (at most) not just any kind of life, but for--particularly and uniquely—human life. So they too, like pro-choicers, must decide what distinguishes a human being from other animals and when, during gestation, the uniquely human qualities--whatever they are--emerge.
Despite many claims to the contrary, life does not begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain that stretches back nearly to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. Nor does human life begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain dating back to the origin of our species, hundreds of thousands of years ago. Every human sperm and egg is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, alive. They are not human beings, of course. However, it could be argued that neither is a fertilized egg.
In some animals, an egg develops into a healthy adult without benefit of a sperm cell. But not, so far as we know, among humans. A sperm and an unfertilized egg jointly comprise the full genetic blueprint for a human being. Under certain circumstances, after fertilization, they can develop into a baby. But most fertilized eggs are spontaneously miscarried. Development into a baby is by no means guaranteed. Neither a sperm and egg separately, nor a fertilized egg, is more than a potential baby or a potential adult. So if a sperm and egg are as human as the fertilized egg produced by their union, and if it is murder to destroy a fertilized egg--despite the fact that it's only potentially a baby--why isn't it murder to destroy a sperm or an egg?
Hundreds of millions of sperm cells (top speed with tails lashing: five inches per hour) are produced in an average human ejaculation. A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages? Many lower animals can be grown in a laboratory from a single body cell. Human cells can be cloned… In light of such cloning technology, would we be committing mass murder by destroying any potentially clonable cells? By shedding a drop of blood?
All human sperm and eggs are genetic halves of "potential" human beings. Should heroic efforts be made to save and preserve all of them, everywhere, because of this "potential"? Is failure to do so immoral or criminal? Of course, there's a difference between taking a life and failing to save it. And there's a big difference between the probability of survival of a sperm cell and that of a fertilized egg. But the absurdity of a corps of high-minded semen-preservers moves us to wonder whether a fertilized egg's mere "potential" to become a baby really does make destroying it murder.
Opponents of abortion worry that, once abortion is permissible immediately after conception, no argument will restrict it at any later time in the pregnancy. Then, they fear, one day it will be permissible to murder a fetus that is unambiguously a human being. Both pro-choicers and pro-lifers (at least some of them) are pushed toward absolutist positions by parallel fears of the slippery slope.
Another slippery slope is reached by those pro-lifers who are willing to make an exception in the agonizing case of a pregnancy resulting from rape or incest. But why should the right to live depend on the circumstances of conception? If the same child were to result, can the state ordain life for the offspring of a lawful union but death for one conceived by force or coercion? How can this be just? And if exceptions are extended to such a fetus, why should they be withheld from any other fetus? This is part of the reason some pro-lifers adopt what many others consider the outrageous posture of opposing abortions under any and all circumstances--only excepting, perhaps, when the life of the mother is in danger.
by the way, I'm unconvinced that, if abortion is murder, that abortion is morally justified even when the life of the mother is in danger. When else do we allow one person to be killed to save another?