The great rethinking on Terri Schiavo began this week with doctors insisting she was both vegetative and blind. Right-wing fundamentalists ran for cover. Sen. Bill Frist, both a medical doctor and, apparently, a mystic, defied the laws of reality by saying he had never suggested Schiavo was not in a vegetative state.

The usual suspects on the left tut-tutted and Michael Schiavo's lawyer announced his client was now open to apologies from anyone who had questioned his character. Michael can be reached at the home he has shared with his fiancee and the family he started while still lawfully married to Terri.

What we have learned from the Schiavo case seems to be limited to the facts of her autopsy, something that could not be performed while she still lived. What we have studiously avoided is the question of what constitutes life and when it can reasonably be terminated. More ethical discussion seems to revolve around veal than around the seriously disabled, brain dead or unborn.

"She had a life that was worth saving," said David Gibbs, a lawyer who represented Robert and Mary Schindler, Terri Schiavo's parents.

Those words go to the heart of the debate the United States has studiously avoided since Roe v. Wade. We know where human life comes from, we know what it resembles, we know, for instance, that strangling Terri Schiavo in her bed one day before she died of dehydration would have elicited homicide charges and that, given that she was in Florida, the charge could well have been Murder One with a visit to the execution chamber to follow. But just as we disguise our executions as medical procedures, with such terms as "the injection room" replacing the more apt "execution chamber", we also demand that our policy on the value of human life masquerade as a diagnosis.

Terry Schiavo was, according to her autopsy, insensate, incapable of communication, unaware of her surroundings and, despite the fact that her eyes seemed to follow a balloon held in front of her, "cortically blind" because the vision centers in her brain had decayed. The question of whether Terri Schiavo was human and whether that basic humanity required some thought about what, in letting her die of dehydration, we might be doing to ourselves as a society never fully entered the picture. It is something that cannot be cut open, weighed in kilograms, cut into laboratory slides and assessed with the certainty of a pathologist.

It is, however, reflective of a certain pathology.

At one time medicine was a branch of philosophy so it seemed reasonable to think that philosophers might have given the matter some thought. Matt Aulisio once studied in Pittsburgh and now thinks in Cleveland, teaching bioethics at Case Western Reserve University. He described how the debate is broken down and, in sum, most of the thrust is about personal autonomy.

"In that debate then you have to address it in light of the societal framework that gives rights to individuals to live their lives according to their moral values," Aulisio said.

Because Terri Schiavo was "decisionally incapacitated," though, the search shifts for a surrogate. Enter Michael Schiavo and, after 10 years of some very hard words, few of them about what it means to be human, exit Terri.

"We could argue out of moral framework that the most fundamental value of human existence should be human life," Aulisio said. "That debate, sort of independent of the appropriate role of government, is an important debate and should go on."

Because our arguments about what to do about something seems entirely separated from why what we are doing is right or wrong, we are in a quandary. Terri Schiavo's day in court came as a sort of property of her husband, not as a citizen of the State of Florida. Christian conservatives treated her little better, using her as a battering ram against the doors of the abortion industry.

But if personal autonomy is really to be the ultimate measure of ethical decision-making, let's consider this one: What if Terri Schiavo had left a very specific directive that, in the event she lapsed into an irreversible state of brain damage, two things were to be done:

1. She wanted to be taken off any life-sustaining equipment and feeding tubes.

2. Upon her death, her dog was to be shot.

We'd be raising holy hell at the inhumanity of the thing. After all, we're not savages.