Imagine her in conversation with Peter Singer. Thanks again, Leslie. I have shortened this to an excerpt because of its length and also in the interest of conserving bandwidth and global warming and stuff.
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He insists he doesn't want to kill me. He simply thinks it would have been better, all things considered, to have given my parents the option of killing the baby I once was, and to let other parents kill similar babies as they come along and thereby avoid the suffering that comes with lives like mine and satisfy the reasonable preferences of parents for a different kind of child. It has nothing to do with me. I should not feel threatened.
Whenever I try to wrap my head around his tight string of syllogisms, my brain gets so fried it's . . . almost fun. Mercy! It's like ''Alice in Wonderland.''
It is a chilly Monday in late March, just less than a year ago. I am at Princeton University. My host is Prof. Peter Singer, often called -- and not just by his book publicist -- the most influential philosopher of our time. He is the man who wants me dead. No, that's not at all fair. He wants to legalize the killing of certain babies who might come to be like me if allowed to live. He also says he believes that it should be lawful under some circumstances to kill, at any age, individuals with cognitive impairments so severe that he doesn't consider them ''persons.'' What does it take to be a person? Awareness of your own existence in time. The capacity to harbor preferences as to the future, including the preference for continuing to live.
At this stage of my life, he says, I am a person. However, as an infant, I wasn't. I, like all humans, was born without self-awareness. And eventually, assuming my brain finally gets so fried that I fall into that wonderland where self and other and present and past and future blur into one boundless, formless all or nothing, then I'll lose my personhood and therefore my right to life. Then, he says, my family and doctors might put me out of my misery, or out of my bliss or oblivion, and no one count it murder.
I have agreed to two speaking engagements. In the morning, I talk to 150 undergraduates on selective infanticide. In the evening, it is a convivial discussion, over dinner, of assisted suicide. I am the token cripple with an opposing view...........................
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The controversial and colorful advocate for the disabled, Harriet McBryde Johnson, died earlier this week at her Charleston home. Johnson first came to national prominence when she publicly challenged Princeton’s Peter Singer on the ethics of euthanizing profoundly disabled infants, and dedicated her life to improving the quality of life for those in institutions she called the “gulag”:
Harriet McBryde Johnson, a feisty champion of the rights of the disabled who came to prominence after she challenged a Princeton professor’s contention that severely disabled newborns could ethically be euthanized, died on Wednesday at her home in Charleston, S.C. She was 50. …
Using a battery-powered wheelchair in which she loved to “zoom around” the streets of Charleston, Ms. Johnson playfully referred to herself as “a bedpan crip” and “a jumble of bones in a floppy bag of skin.”
Rolling into an auditorium at the College of Charleston on April 22, 2001, Ms. Johnson went to the microphone during a question-and-answer session to confront Peter Singer, a philosopher from Princeton, who was giving a lecture titled “Rethinking Life and Death.” ….
An e-mail exchange followed that encounter in Charleston, leading to an invitation to debate Professor Singer at Princeton on March 25, 2002. Their two encounters were the subject of the 8,000-word Times article, which brought Ms. Johnson considerable attention in the disability rights movement and from the general public.
She also drew “considerable attention” when she argued for Congressional intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. In fact, she gave one of the most dispassionate and logical arguments to stop the efforts by the court to remove Schiavo’s feeding tube, certainly less emotional than many on that side of the debate. Re-reading it now will recall all of the drama and anger of those days, but Johnson’s example should have served to instruct how the rest of the debate should have been conducted.
Lest anyone think that Johnson was a doctrinaire conservative, one should read the Times’ well-written obituary. She argued for public financing for home care for the profoundly disabled, calling the nursing-home system a “gulag”. In 2003, she railed against care facilities where the disabled got parked in front of blaring televisions and ignored by the staff. “I sometimes dare to dream that the gulag will be gone in a generation or two,” Johnson once wrote.
Johnson always recognized the power of the individual and the spark of the divine in human life. She never stopped advocating for equality and dignity for those with disabilities of any kind and especially those with severe handicaps. Johnson maintained a sense of humor and self-deprecating wit that allowed people to see her as the complete person she was. Harriet McBryde Johnson will be sorely missed in the years to come.
Fausta has more.
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