I had a wonderful encounter with Tish yesterday. Five hours of glorious conversation! It did my mind and heart good. I can write more about this, but the hour is late. I’m sure tidbits of what we processed will inspire a number of future posts.

We discussed, among many topics, the issue of cultural responses to fat and to bodies that are different from the “norm.” I remembered an article I read in the New York Times last year that I’d blogged about in my retired original blog (The Hestia Chronicles). I dug it out of the archives and am re-posting the excerpt. The Times requires registration; since this is an old article, you’ll have to pay if you want to read the entire piece. It’s worth the cost. It’s the most provocative essay I have read on the topic. Ever.

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.
–from Unspeakable Conversations by Harriet McBryde Johnson; New York Times Magazine, 2/16/03.