Choice Devours Itself

On a not-yet murder in Texas

Margo Naranjo

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Once upon a time, there was a successful businesswoman named Marjorie. One day, while visiting her family, Marjorie suffered a stroke. Doctors stabilized her and judged that she wasn’t terminally ill. She was disabled, but the prognosis for rehabilitation was good. However, she had forgotten how to swallow food without aspirating. So when they moved her to a nursing home, they gave her a feeding tube.

But her brother was distressed. You see, Marjorie had told him once that if she were terminally ill, she wouldn’t want to be kept on a feeding tube. So he decided to wait and see if she could be weaned off of it. If she couldn’t, he would order it removed. Never mind that this wasn’t really the scenario Marjorie herself had envisioned. It was close enough.

Time passed, and Marjorie didn’t improve. So her brother made an executive decision.

As Marjorie lay in bed, slowly dehydrating, something happened that no one had anticipated: She began to speak. Specifically, she began asking for food and water. “Please feed me,” she begged. “I’m hungry. I’m thirsty.”

Some of the staff began secretly nourishing her, on and off, until someone blew the whistle. An investigation followed. A temporary guardian was appointed. He had one job, a twenty-four job: Determine whether Marjorie was competent to make her own decisions. Of course, by now she was severely malnourished and unresponsive. Had she been “competent” when she was first begging the staff for food and water? No one cared. She was not competent “at this time,” and it was on that basis that a judge ordered the dehydration to resume. Her temporary guardian wanted to appeal, but by then, it was too late. Marjorie died on April 6, 1995.

Many years ago, when my mother was an active social critic, she coined a phrase for cases like these: “Choice devours itself.” This was what she meant: Liberals have placed autonomy at the top of their value hierarchy, whether they’re discussing the beginning of life, the end of life, or all the life lived/decisions made in between (especially sexual decisions). No one has the right to make decisions about your body except you. Or so the enlightened liberal script goes.

But there’s a small problem. The principle of bodily autonomy does not tell us how to weigh life against death. This means it will not tell us to err on the side of life. That evaluation must come from somewhere else. In the end, someone, somewhere must always answer the question: Death, or life?

In other words, liberalism has created a moral vacuum. And—increasingly, steadily—those who would answer “Death” have rushed in. “You can die” is now “You should die.” Because sometimes, we’re told, death is better than life.

Maybe you thought so too, once, when you were young and strong and invulnerable. Maybe you told friends and family that you would just hate to live “like that” if you were old and declining, or if anything “happened” sooner, God forbid. Maybe you put it in writing, maybe you didn’t. Maybe, like Marjorie, you threw in the caveat that you had to be terminally ill. Or maybe you said something more sweeping. One way or another, you let it be known: If you could choose, this was your choice.

But fast-forward forty years, or forty days, or forty hours, even. Like Marjorie, your autonomy is gone. Like Marjorie, you are entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. Your family is exhausted. Someone has told them they don’t have to go on like this. After all, it’s not what you would have wanted, is it?

There have been many men and women like Marjorie. Men and women whose lives and deaths you never heard about, because nobody deemed them important enough. But just occasionally, we do hear about them. We’re hearing about one right now. Her name is Margo Naranjo, and she’s still alive—for the moment.