Terri Schiavo's ordeal is part and parcel of a battle between proponents of "choice" and those who insist that every human being has a "right to life". This struggle, in its current form, goes back at least to the 1970s.
But do we, in fact, have a "right to life"?
The Declaration of Independence states that we do. Its second paragraph begins: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are [...] endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." But are these rights so self-evident and unalienable?
I'll sign off on "pursuit of Happiness" at once. After all, this does not pretend to guarantee actual happiness to anyone ― only the right to pursue it, not the right to catch it.
"Liberty" is less obvious, and should have been less obvious to the signors of the Declaration, many of whom owned ― and considered it another of their God-given unalienable rights to own ― slaves, people ("men") whose right to liberty was neither self-evident nor unalienable. In fact, if we look at the gamut of people over the range of freedom that may be available to us, we may note that we have special names for those people at the ends of that range: slaves at the one end, sociopaths at the other. After all, a person who considers his own personal "liberty" of behavior and action to be absolute is a person absolutely without regard for the rights of others. So ultimately our right to "liberty" is neither self-evident nor, in terms of our relations with those around us, unalienable.
"Right to life" in the context of the current discussion / debate / conflict is generally applied with regard to the unborn who, presumably, cannot defend themselves. It is argued that once a child has been conceived, that child has the right to live. The termination of the "life" of the unborn by uncaring parents and evil "abortion doctors" has been likened to the Holocaust that Hitler and his minions visited upon European Jewry more than half a century ago ― in fact, that very word has been used.
Is it appropriate? From figures I've seen, as many as one third of all conceptions result in spontaneous termination, a figure all the evil abortion doctors in the world working in concert would find extremely difficult to equal. So perhaps the unborn do ― and always have ― suffered from an invisible, and generally unnoticed, holocaust; but it is not people who visit this holocaust upon them, but ― to invoke the terminology used by most in the "right to life" camp ― God. In any case, it is pretty clear that the Creator of these tiniest and youngest of "all men" has not endowed them with any self-evident or unalienable right to Life.
What of those who have passed the point of birth? Among children, at least, historically ― and this was true at the time of the Declaration ― a child had no automatic right to life. As late as the early part of the twentieth century in America, and later elsewhere, a large percentage of those children who made it to birth did not make it to their first birthday, and a lot more didn't make it to their fifth; they were carried off by childhood diseases ("acts of God", if you will). These children, too, had no right to Life, though many were lucky.
What about grown people? Even if we ignore the acts of men (murders, executions, sixty-four thousand Americans and millions of southeast Asians killed in war in Viet-nam, more than a thousand Americans and untold tens of thousands of Iraqis killed in war in Iraq, genocide in Sudan) as human-induced violations of some hypothetical right to Life, how about acts of God? How many people died in last December's tsunami in the Indian Ocean? I've seen figures ranging up to a quarter of a million. What happened to these people's right to Life? It was not, apparently, unalienable.
In fact, when you look at matters more broadly, nobody has a right to Life; in the end, everybody dies. Life is not something to which you have a right; it's something that is lent to you, for a little space of time, and is then taken away. If you're lucky, you'll be able to make some use of it; if not, either you won't have the time, or you'll simply waste it. But in any event, Life is not a right. It's a privilege.