When Terri Schiavo told her husband and some friends that it was her wish never to be kept alive in a comatose or persistently vegetative state, and when a Florida state judge believed their testimony even though it was directly contradicted by her parents, many good people on both sides of the right-to-life debate simply could not accept an outcome that resulted in her death, so long as her parents were willing and able to keep her alive.

Many of my right-to-life colleagues condemned both Florida state judge George Greer and Michael Schiavo, Terri’s husband, for wanting “to kill Terri.” The law, they have compellingly argued, should err on the side of life.

Unfortunately for the wishes of Terri’s parents, the law errs on the side of self-determination. Since the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Cruzan v. Missouri, every state in the Union has recognized that any adult may refuse to take food, water, and medical treatment. That principle is easier stated than obeyed because of patients like Terri, whose personal wishes, though clear to some and hotly contested by others, must nevertheless be ascertained by a stranger – here a state court judge.

But if the parents are willing to care for her, many have argued, why not just let them? Michael, they contend, hasn’t been her real husband for 15 years; why should he decide? You can’t legally starve a dog or a convicted serial killer to death, so why Terri? All these profound arguments miss the point of the law: Just as Terri could legally starve herself to death, she can expect the courts – whose job it is to ascertain and to effectuate her intentions – will permit that to happen for and to her, once they conclude that this is what she wished. It is Terri’s will, not Michael’s, not her parents’, and not Judge Greer’s, that the law commands be followed.

So how did we get here? Would anyone in her right mind really choose death by starvation? If suicide and attempted suicide are criminal, why should anyone die just because a court found that she wanted to? Does anyone really, in the last agonizing moments, want to die rather than live? Regrettably, as a society, we have made these questions easy to answer. Any culture that does not respect life at its origins, cannot be expected to respect it at its end. Our culture of death has become part of the positive law of the land, because judges have recognized since Roe v. Wade the right of a woman to choose to kill the fetus growing within her, and the same judges so strongly continue to uphold this right that virtually every legislative effort to ban or modify it – to err, if you will, on the side of life – has been struck down. So steadfast have been federal judges – no matter who appoints them – to uphold the right of the mother to choose the death of the fetus, that at least one state has decriminalized self-administered abortions. This perversion has in turn led to decisions by prosecutors not to pursue aggressively those who murder infants. What is the qualitative difference, the unspoken argument goes, between a baby one minute shy of birth, whose abortion in many states is lawful, and a baby one minute after birth, who is equally as unwanted by the mother?

This satanic logic – which graduates from the right to kill a fetus to the right to kill a baby, – rests on the Roe-generated assumption that a human being has, under the guise of privacy, the right to kill another innocent human being. This way of thinking has now become so integral to our Western culture that since abortion was made legal in 1973, over 35 million abortions have been performed in America, with only an occasional religious or academic protest.

Now, what does abortion have to do with the fate of Terri Schiavo? It has everything to do with it. Any society that will legally look the other way when death of this magnitude occurs, has knowingly embraced a culture of death for those unable to challenge it. And a culture of death has led elsewhere to some of history’s greatest abominations. One does not need to be a historian to recall the horrors that cultures of death brought about in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. The culture of death results from its legal acceptance under some fleeting popular premise, such as the privacy of the perpetrator, the weakness, or lack of utility, or lack of legal personhood of the victim, or the government’s need to feed the appetites of fanatics.

In the case of Terri Schiavo, under the law given by the same court that has consistently upheld Roe, we have somehow legally, culturally, and – dare I say – morally come to accept death by starvation as self-willed and therefore lawful. But we only accept it for those too young or too weak to protest. Comes now the Congress to enter this dispute in Terri Schiavo’s Holy Week of agony. And just what did Congress do to assault the culture of death? Did it abrogate Cruzan and declare that no one may starve herself – directly or through others – to death? It did not. Did it enact legislation with safeguards for patients whose wishes have been disputed or inartfully expressed so as to assure that only those who truly wish to die by starvation in fact die that way? It did not. Did it define all life at every stage as that gift only possessable by persons, so as to assure that no person’s life is taken or permitted to expire, without the Constitution’s guarantee of due process? It did not.

Congress, rarely willing to demonstrate real courage and never able to abide by the limitations imposed on its powers by the Constitution its members have sworn to uphold and defend, created a right for Terri Schiavo alone to have her case reviewed by a federal judge. Congress’s two-page legislation, which at least one senator claimed “ordered” the federal courts to examine and scrutinize the tens of thousands of pages from the Florida state courts, reads as if to suggest that a federal judge, looking at the same evidence as did the state judge, ought to come to a different conclusion about what Terri Schiavo wished for herself. Not surprisingly, of the 22 federal jurists who looked at this ultra-unconstitutional law, all but two rejected its so-called commands.

Can Congress write a law for just one person when many others are similarly situated? No. That violates the Constitution’s equal protection requirement. Did Congress actually give – or just appear in the press to have done so – any substantive or procedural rights to Terri Schiavo? No; she already had – and her parents exercised for her before Congress got involved – the right to seek federal review of any alleged state action that impaired her federally guaranteed rights. Did Congress take the lead in addressing the culture of death? No, no, no. That would require political courage and moral clarity.

Dying is part of life. But just as creation comes about only after acts of nature and permission of the Divine Will, so, too, should come death: not through politics or the courts or even self-will, but through the wishes of the Almighty expressed through His natural law. Only a society focused on death would use the power of its government not to forestall but to hasten it. Only a government that is gutless and devoid of moral bearing would fail to use its power to err on the side of life by leading an assault on the culture of death. And only a people whose mores accept legally the wholesale slaughter of innocents should not be surprised when the culture of death graduates to yet another level of destruction.

Mr. Napolitano was a judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, and is senior judicial analyst at Fox News. He is the author of “Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws.” (Nelson Current, 2004)