On March 31, 2005, Terri Schiavo was pronounced dead. After a long, drawn out legal battle, a judge ordered her feeding and hydration tubes removed so she would die of thirst and starvation. Schiavo was a young lady who had lapsed into an irreversible vegetative state, but was not dependent on artificial life support to stay alive, other than the feeding tube. While her own family wanted to take custody of her and keep her alive, her husband, Michael Schiavo, for financial and other selfish reasons, wanted her dead. And in the end, he won the battle in the courts.
Now there is another case. In this one, Chris Dunn has been sentenced to die by the Houston Methodist Hospital Biomedical Ethics Committee. It seems Mr. Dunn entered the hospital with a mass on his pancreas, and his medical condition rapidly deteriorated. But unlike Terri Schiavo, Chris Dunn is not comatose. He is fully conscious and aware, wants to live, and has communicated this desire. But to keep him alive, it is necessary for the hospital to keep him on life support. It seems that the Ethics Committee at Houston Methodist has decided that it is just too expensive to keep him alive, and has invoked their right to terminate his treatment.
Frankly, this is just sick. That said, the hospital and those who sympathize with the hospital’s decision see it another way.
So, how is it possible for there to be such a wide gap in the beliefs of the two sides? Actually, the answer is quite simple. Here is another place where naturalistic and biblical worldviews are in conflict.
Naturalism is the belief that the natural universe is all that exists. As such, human life has no special meaning. Thus, when an individual life is deemed to be a drag on the collective, terminating that life is seen to be the just thing to do. In this case, the drag is that it is simply too expensive to keep Chris alive when those funds could be “better spent” on people with stronger prospects for life.
A biblical worldview, on the other hand, recognizes human life as especially valuable because human beings were created in the image of God. As God is the giver of life and he has revealed that human life has ultimate value, biblical Christians see taking innocent life as a sin against God.
It is a sad day when American culture has come to the place where a death panel is given the right to terminate a life simply to save money. This is a cause that every Christian – really every American – should fight for. Chris’ life has been deemed valueless because a group of people have created arbitrary criteria for determining a life’s value – criteria which exclude Chris. If this is allowed to stand, what happens when other classes of people become inconvenient? This kind of barbarity must end now!