A recent conversation turned to Tom DeLay and his apparent political misstep in thinking that Americans would largely support governmental intervention in the Terri Schiavo case. He probably presupposed that the wider discomfort for abortion rights would be easily applicable to this case here. He seems to have been wrong.
When I thought about why, and what occurred to me is an important difference between the abortion and right-to-die issues: with abortion, it's an issue that fewer people will ever have to confront. It's therefore much easier to rationalize government intervention because it's not likely to be your body that will be regulated. It only affects women (at least in so far as pregnancy being a condition that only affects women's bodies), and only some of them at that. Also unwanted pregnancies are conditions often suffered in shamed, isolating silence, thus further stoking the perception that abortion bans would affect only a few, wayward people. Consequently it requires a tremendous amount of empathy, which often seems lacking, to recognize that even though it's not your body being regulated, it's someone else's - someone with the same interest you might have in being free from governmental control.
On the other hand, everybody dies. Everybody knows someone who dies. There are relatively few people lonely and isolated enough to never have to consider end-of-life issues for a loved one, or themselves. Quality of life and right-to-die issues therefore are not abstract concepts that only affect a few strangers; people can recognize their own self-interest at stake much more easily, and so government regulation appears much more obviously to be a gross imposition on their physical autonomy.
Edited 7/10/05