What “culture of life”?

I believe the word “pro-life,” used in the case of Terri Schiavo and in the anti-abortion movement, should be taken seriously. I don’t think it is just part of a linguistic battle for political advantage: pro-life versus pro-choice. I think pro-lifers are preoccupied with life — but largely because they are obsessed by death. Not only, or chiefly, the deaths of the unborn or Terri Schiavo, but by a deathliness they sense all around, that leads to panic.

I don’t mean the certainty of death that everyone must face. I mean a sense of death engendered by one’s own society, those you identify with and depend on — when they seem to embrace and encourage death even if it could be avoided or contested. Think about the U.S. in that light.

It is the only developed country with capital punishment. In 1999, it ranked fifth in executions, after China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Those executions are celebrated in politics and at tailgate parties. It has the world’s largest prison population — a kind of living death — absolutely and per capita. In 2003, one in 75 U.S. men were in jail. Even when violent crime dropped, incarceration rose. Then attorney-general John Ashcroft said it was because the killers were in jail. So there is never relief from the fear of death, just a need for more jail for some, and more guns and ongoing fear for the rest.

There is the new terror, since 9/11, of death by terror. Now the U.S. is building, says The Guardian, an eerie, “global system of detention centres where prisoners are held incommunicado.” They are shuttled around and called “ghost detainees” — more death in life. U.S. soldiers die in Iraq and are furtively transported home. They don’t know why they are targeted and hated, but death haunts them. At home, millions lack medical insurance. In Canada, health care may be inadequate, but there is a commitment by the whole society, i.e., everyone around you, to provide care. In the United States, you live in a society with no commitment to aiding you when illness takes hold. You are on your own against death in a way you are not elsewhere.

What do you do when you sense this kind of deathliness? You can try to confront and change it. But that may lead to frustration, along with a painful admission that many of your leaders are unworthy or ill-motivated. And it implies the wrenching admission that much of this death never needed to be. Or you decline to confront the pervasive deathliness in its many disturbing forms. Instead, you panic, focus on isolated symbols, and respond to them in anguish with vague slogans. You Choose Life and demand a tube be put back into Terri Schiavo. It’s not surprising that the language of death pulses through this kind of “pro-Life” movement. On TV this week, Terri Schiavo’s father referred to “this judge who’s on a crusade to kill our daughter.”

The positive news from the U.S. is that a majority, according to polls, now rejects slogans and symbols as a way of reacting to the Schiavo situation. It is not surprising that politicians, from the President to Congress, went that route. They are the ones who sustain the morbidity through their foreign policy, militarism, a counterproductive penal system, inadequate health care. It is in their interest to view the general deathliness as normal and encourage symbolic responses. And there is that sizable minority praying and protesting. In my opinion, they are not choosing Life; they are worried about death and choosing rhetoric, but the source of their disturbance is real.

I have been thinking, all week, about the death last Friday of a superb friend, Judge Lynn King, after a long, hideous battle with cancer. I could not possibly do justice to her unique combination of acerbic honesty and oceanic compassion, on the bench and off — and others have already paid tribute to it. But last time I saw her, on Boxing Day, I asked how she was. “You really want to know?” she said with, I swear, a smile. “It really sucks.” Spitting with zest and humour in the face of a death that is inevitable — that is the true culture of life — and a legacy not just to her splendid young sons but to us all.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.