We are not our own
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHN GARVEY WE ARE NOT OUR OWN And that's a comfort Hears ago those who opposed permissive abortion laws predicted that euthanasia would be the next great cause, and they were...
...She was really holding on to the edge of hope with her fingernails at the most crucial time of her life...
...I have no doubt that Doctor Kevorkian is sincere, but sincerity is not a virtue...
...it is more like a mood...
...And because all of these ideas are accepted simply as true by most Americans, it follows that abortion must be permitted, and that euthanasia is acceptable...
...The ideas of self-sufficiency and autonomy so valued by our culture are given the lie by our experience: We have language and culture because of our relationship with other people...
...The person exists, but only in relationship...
...Weil believed that the idea of justice, and the duties and moral obligations which flow from it, offered a more profound way of understanding our relationships with one another...
...We are not free not to be mortal, not to be contingent, and nothing tells us of this contingency more powerfully than the involuntary nature of family, and the fact of mortality...
...Of course they were right...
...And yet, they are, to say the least, questionable...
...Doctor Jack Kevorkian has gone, in the estimation of many, from being someone ghoulish and scary, an obsessive neurotic who helps depressed people to kill themselves, to someone who is just a little too intense, a kind of Ralph Nader for the Hemlock Society set, a misguided defender of a basic human right...
...When I go to nursing homes and hospitals I find it very easy to sympathize with people who, faced with the thought of long suffering or dementia, want not to endure any of it and are willing to consider suicide...
...This is essential to how we must think of ourselves and our selfhood, and this is precisely what abortion and euthanasia violate...
...it is our cross, to live out the hope that the cross is not the end, that death has been overcome by the source of life, and living it out in the face of death is also a sign of that life.ign of that life...
...As Christians we believe in the person, but not the individual...
...Christianity offers us an alternative to the despair which can come from any serious contemplation of the human condition...
...It is part of what the cross means...
...Isn't my body my own...
...we have nothing that is simply and uniquely our own...
...Ultimately the answer is no—because we are not our own, and death proves, more than anything else could, that even if we could control our deaths (and suicides don't...
...they control the hour, which is different) we haven't done much...
...We are free within this limit to make of it all that we will, but even our understanding of this freedom is in some sense given to us by someone else...
...Both assume the unchallengeable nature of the idea of rights, and the idea of the individual...
...I can sympathize with them completely, and yet I know that this is finally to surrender to despair...
...Our freedom is marvelous, essential to what we are...
...Simone Weil once wrote that the idea of rights was Roman in origin, and had much of its basis in the right to own human beings...
...The configuration varies from person to person (much in the way that no two shells or snowflakes are exactly alike), but as persons we are the results of lovemaking by people other than ourselves, and a language and culture we are given by people other than ourselves...
...Quite apart from the notion of rights, the idea of the individual and the ideas involving autonomy that flow from it are taken for granted by most of us...
...I remember giving Communion to a person who knew that she was dying, and when she had received it we talked a little, and it was clear to me that she hoped what she had just done meant something real and was not an illusion...
...OF SEVERAL MINDS JOHN GARVEY WE ARE NOT OUR OWN And that's a comfort Hears ago those who opposed permissive abortion laws predicted that euthanasia would be the next great cause, and they were met with ridicule: Beware the slippery-slope argument, they were told...
...but the paradox is that we must finally surrender even that...
...a father, for example, could claim not only his slaves but his wife and children as his property...
...After all, doesn't a woman have a right to control her own body...
...It tells us that we are not our own—something we could see without the aid of Christianity—but it also tells us that we exist because we are loved, and that love has overcome the death which drives our fears...
...At the same time, it is hard in the face of the evidence of death to believe this...
...Both assume the body as something owned by its bearer, a form of property or real estate...
...It is a mood that echoes something in the air, something very American, and it is easy to see how it connects with permissive abortion laws: both have to do with the rights of the individual...
...Abortion and euthanasia assume the ideas of individuality and autonomy like nothing else...
Vol. 123 • October 1996 • No. 17
