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Life in the Balance My first teacher of sitting and moving meditation, Master Moon Kim, frequently said that the most important thing in life is balance. He sometimes expanded on the idea, talking about the balance between work and play, work and family, exercise and rest, attention to the spiritual and attention to the mundane. But most of the time he summarized his views in the single word: “Balance!” As a young law professor working toward tenure, writing a book, and parenting my first child, this word had a special resonance for me. “Balance!” I often said to myself as I turned from my computer to my child. “Balance!” as I left the law school at lunchtime to go sit on the wooden training floor of the dojo. Exemplifying the yin and yang he was teaching, and probably under the impression that his meditating students had their eyes closed, Master Kim would quietly stroll the length of the floor, interrupting his peaceful walk now and then with a totally unexpected head-high leap. The landing was completely silent. To the properly meditating student, only a slight movement of the air might suggest that Moon Kim’s yin had shifted to yang. Looking back, I can see that my time watching his unexpected leaps and seamless return to ordinary walking taught me some lessons about balance even if it distracted me from meditation practice. Nor did it escape me that the balance he described was practiced routinely by the courts whose decisions I parsed with students on a daily basis. Balance is a part of interpretation that rarely makes it into the public eye. Yet the law is continuously intertwined with our lives, and also requires balance. And sometimes the law leaps up to startle us as it intrudes on our assumptions and our daily routines. Recently there have been some highly public intrusions of the law on our lives. As humans we make decisions and choices that are personal and very private. But sometimes the law elbows its way into those decisions and limits our choices. The extent to which the law should be allowed to interfere with private moral decisionmaking is a contentious subject in America today, especially on the topic of when life begins and when it ends. The touchstone for this issue in American law is the Supreme Court decision in Roe vs. Wade. In that case the private moral decision of a woman to end her pregnancy and the attempt of the state of Texas to stop her became the context in which the Court and all of us considered the public control of private morality. Balance. The Court acknowledged frankly that it needed to balance the woman’s interest in making decisions about her own body—called her right of privacy—and the interest of the state in protecting potential life. During the first trimester, the woman’s right was paramount. Somewhere in the third trimester, after the fetus was viable outside the womb, weight was given to the state’s interest in protecting the potentiality of human life. The Court refused to draw a line defining the fetus as a person. The Justices considered the questions difficult—more than merely legal or merely scientific—in that they involve people, their feelings, and their moral views.Balance. That was 1973. Recently we have experienced fiery public debates about the termination of life as a private moral choice. Prominent among them were the maelstrom that swirled around Terry Schiavo, whose feeding tube was removed after she had been in a vegetative state for 20 years, and controversy about Oregon ’s law that allows a terminally ill person like Jack Newbold to end his life. As we struggle to find our own moral path among these controversies, we face not only a private decision about ourselves or a loved one, but are also invited to add our ideas to the public discourse. In the end Moon Kim’s simple advice may be the deepest wisdom: balance. The idea that murder is something the state should prohibit is comfortable for all of us. But the simple template of “thou shalt not kill” is less helpful. Some say that life begins at conception, and therefore abortion is murder. This absolutist reasoning has been extended to stem cell research, and is reflected in the view that “conception” includes an egg fertilized in a test tube, allowed to divide three or four times, and then frozen. The absolutist view also says that discarding unwanted fertilized eggs at the request of the couple who generated them is murder. There are advocacy groups who encourage couples to “adopt” these fertilized eggs, implant them in the adoptive mother’s womb, carry the embryo to term, and parent the child who is born. Faced with an adorable child who would not exist if the original plan had been carried out, it is difficult to deny that the possibility for life exists even in a frozen fertilized egg. Now entering the stem cell debate are those who label “murder” any research with an unfertilized egg. They say that when the woman’s genetic material is stripped from the egg in the initial stage of stem cell research, the possibility that the egg could develop into a human being is eliminated, and that is murder. Extending this view, others say that even sperm cells (which are spilled daily by the millions in bedrooms across America ) can be considered “potential life” and their disposal murder. These arguments send me reeling. As individuals, we need to assert balance in our moral own decisionmaking. As a society, we need to create in our laws a reasonable balance that accommodates our multicultural population, our commitment to religious toleration, and the understanding that life is precious. But how do we find this balance? A place to start is with the sense of the self, and the inherent worth of every human. When we look around the world today and see children of every race and religion living in poverty and subject to oppression and degradation, I hope we see reasons why a sperm cell should not be regarded as the equivalent of a living human being. We might begin to protect life by actions that honor the need of children everywhere for a decent home, good medical care, and at least a basic education. I have two adopted children. I love these children more than I can express. If their birthmothers had decided to have abortions, I would not know either Jamie or Kevin. If I (or someone like me) had not been there to adopt and love these two amazing youngsters, their young birthmothers would have had unhappy choices to make. Adoption is a wonderful thing. But, to me, it is first an obligation to see that the unparented children on this planet have loving homes, and second that women who are pregnant but unable to parent be assured that loving homes await the unborn children they wish to carry to term. Only when we have fully addressed the needs of the living would I, in my particular and personal balance on the subject of potential life, turn to the issue of stem cell research using fertilized eggs, unfertilized eggs, and (yes) the millions of helpless sperm that are never given the opportunity to breathe free. And when I turn there, I would—again—first look around at the living people who suffer from Alzheimer’s, diabetes, MS, Parkinson’s. These are people in my own family; people in my neighborhood; people in this congregation. Do they not deserve our moral attention? Can we elevate the well-being of a fertilized or unfertilized egg over the suffering and slow death of people who are not merely before our eyes, but in our hearts and prayers? Let us invoke balance. And when we turn to the termination of life, to Terry Schiavo whose consciousness had been gone for years, or to Jack Newbold who registers every day an increase in pain, it is right and moral to consider what values are in the balance. There are medical resources spent on sustaining the life of someone in a vegetative state, or of the terminally ill who suffer unbearably but whose lives are extended by technology. Yet the economic “cost-benefit” is not the only or the most important consideration in the balance. In Jack Newbold, alert and aware despite his pain, we see the self-determination of someone who can articulate his desire to shorten briefly a life that is already near its end. We who believe in personal autonomy, in private moral decisionmaking if no others are harmed, ought to weigh heavily in our balancing the right of Jack and others like him to end their own suffering. In Terry Schiavo, we can see the difficulty of balancing on the one hand the dangers of allowing others to decide to terminate someone’s life—or on the other hand to decide that it may not be terminated. We see the value in articulating our own wishes in advance so that, if we are no longer self-determining, those we love are in no doubt about what we would want for ourselves. We also see the considerations that must be weighed if those wishes are not clear: guesses about what we would want; about the quality of life we experience; the possibility of our return to awareness; and the very meaning of personhood, of “life.” Because it is life that is in the balance in all these decisions. As human beings, as moral actors, we must ask what it means to be alive and to be human. We must discern, through our own experience and the stories of others, the qualities that make us human, the conditions necessary to experience our humanity, and the steps we’re willing to take to enable all human beings to live full lives. If we understand what it means to be fully human, and live a life that is rich with love and experience and growth, then we ought to include that understanding in every moral judgment we make about abortion, stem cell research, and the end of life. Our moral decisionmaking is not meant to be the rote repetition of an absolutist rule. Life is complicated, humans are complex, and there are many values to weigh in the balance. As we find balance in our own lives, as we learn to see the shape of things of the spirit, we can understand what it means to be fully human. And we then can speak to the balance that our legal system strikes. From Roe vs. Wade to Terry Schiavo, those rules should not be dry legal texts that follow some supposedly inevitable scientific principle or absolutist moral position. They must be leavened by our own humanity. When life is in the balance, our laws should be an extension of what is in our hearts. They should reflect our lives and our knowledge of what it means to be human. They should translate to the larger community the balance we discover from our own humanity. For each of us, balance. For all of us, balance. The Court said, “We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer. It should be sufficient to note briefly the wide divergence of thinking on this most sensitive and difficult question. There has always been strong support for the view that life does not begin until live birth. This was the belief of the Stoics. 56 It appears to be the predominant, though not the unanimous, attitude of the Jewish faith. 57 It may be taken to represent also the position of a large segment of the Protestant community, insofar as that can be ascertained; organized groups that have taken a formal position on the abortion issue have generally regarded abortion as a matter for the conscience of the individual and her family. 58 As we have noted, the common law found greater significance in quickening. Physicians and their scientific colleagues have regarded that event with less interest and have tended to focus either upon conception, upon live birth, or upon the interim point at which the fetus becomes "viable," that is, potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid. 59 Viability is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks. 60 The Aristotelian theory of "mediate animation," that held sway throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Europe, continued to be official Roman Catholic dogma until the 19th century, despite opposition to this "ensoulment" theory from those in the Church who would recognize the existence of life from the moment of conception. 61 The latter is now, of course, the official belief of the Catholic Church. As one brief amicus discloses, this is a view strongly held by many non-Catholics as well, and by many physicians. Substantial problems for precise definition of this view are posed, however, by new embryological data that purport to indicate that conception is a "process" over time, rather than an event, and by new medical techniques such as menstrual extraction, the "morning-after" pill, implantation of embryos, artificial insemination, and even artificial wombs.” Roe v. Wade (US Supreme Court, Jan. 22, 1973) (footnotes omitted) (quotation is of text accompanying notes 56-62). |
