Posted on 10/20/2003 9:08:00 PM PDT by Chancellor Palpatine
Just a few decades ago cases of brain death, vegetative state, and locked-in syndrome were rare. These days, medicine's "therapeutic triumphs" have made these neurologic conditions rather frequent. For all its power to restore life and health, we now realize, modern medicine also has great potential for prolonging a dehumanizing existence for the patient.
We realize this, and we're starting to deal with it. In landmark legal cases from Karen Quinlan to Nancy Cruzan, society has come to see that it's sometimes sensible to stop treatment in patients lingering in permanent vegetative states (PVS). That progress has been hard-won and welcome. But anybody who thought that the dilemmas of PVS were troublesome hasn't seen anything yet.
The United States has thousands or tens of thousands of patients in vegetative states; nobody knows for sure exactly how many. But before long, this country will have several million patients with Alzheimer's dementia. The challenges and costs of maintaining vegetative state patients will pale in comparison to the problems presented by Alzheimer's disease.
Since women now live much longer than men, and since Alzheimer's is a disease of the elderly, most of these patients will be female. Many will spend their last years largely unaware of themselves or their surroundings.
If people really understood the reality of this dementia, I doubt they'd find it an acceptable lifestyle. Being in a state of wakeful oblivion for five to 10 years or sometimes longer is a degrading experience. The degradation is borne not so much by the patient, who may be completely unaware of him- or herself, but by the patient's family. They must endure the agony of seeing a loved one lying there year after year, often sustained only by a feeding tube.
Just as we've tried to come to grips with appropriate care of PVS patients, we've got to confront the dilemma of dealing with the demented. Comfortable solutions aren't easy to find.
So much in medicine today is driving the public towards physician-assisted suicide. Many onlookers are dismayed by doctors' fear of giving families responsibility in these cases; our failure to appreciate that families suffer a great deal too in making decisions; our archaic responses to pain and suffering; our failure to accept death as a reality and an inevitable outcome of life; our inability to be realistic and humane in treating irreversibly ill people. All of this has shaken the public's confidence in the medical profession.
People fear becoming prisoners of medical technology, and their fears are largely justified. When medicine and society refuse to face up to tough questions of treatment and honor individual values, physician-assisted suicide and active euthanasia start to look like the only open exits.
Consider, for example, the case of Jamie Butcher -- a young Minnesota man of 34 who spent half his life in a vegetative state. After tending his inert body for 17 years, his parents finally made the heartbreaking choice to let him die. You couldn't find two more loving, caring, intelligent parents than Jim and Pattie Butcher. Their decision to remove Jamie's feeding tube should have been relatively simple -- and entirely private. But right-to-lifers and some disability groups fought the Butcher family every step of the way, assailing their legitimate choice to withhold futile treatment as an act of euthanasia.
This is just the sort of inflammatory talk that threatens to drive society down the path towards physician-assisted suicide. Medical organizations, courts and other groups generally agree that there are some important distinctions between stopping treatment and acting to cause a patient's death. By insisting that withdrawing a feeding tube is akin to euthanasia, these special interest groups are undermining their credibility.
And they're creating unnecessary confusion for the growing numbers of families losing a loved one to Alzheimer's. Vegetative state cases are not nearly as numerous as cases of Alzheimer's. But both kinds of cases force families to mull over the same question: When the human brain is so badly damaged that its owner can no longer think or even eat, what should be done?
This is a question families should feel free to answer for themselves -- without fearing intrusion from outsiders. And when you really think about it, the idea of placing a feeding tube in a patient with advanced Alzheimer's disease makes no sense at all, medically or morally. It borders on barbaric and cruel. It's just the kind of dehumanizing medical intervention that the public finds so distasteful. It's the sort of practice that undermines confidence that doctors have the best interests of patients and families at heart.
In Europe, feeding tubes are rarely seen in nursing homes. Once a patient is so severely brain-damaged that only artificial nutrition can sustain life, many doctors and families rightly ask, "What's the point?" In many civilized countries, the question wouldn't be asked -- because placing a feeding tube in someone with end-stage dementia wouldn't even be considered.
But here in the United States, many caregivers wouldn't consider not placing a feeding tube in the same patients.
It's hard to understand why. If we want our loved ones to live and die in dignity, we ought to think twice before suspending them in the last stage of irreversible dementia. At it is, it seems that we're not thinking at all.
-- Ronald Cranford, of Bloomington, is a neurologist at Hennepin County Medical Center and a faculty associate at the University of Minnesota's Center for Biomedical Ethics
Please don't presume to speak for me. I've seen the videos of Terri and I've prayed for her. BUT I also told my wife that under no circumstances would I want to continue living like Terri, if you can call it living. So the "them" you refer to is me.
This "compassionate" appeal to murder people not up to his royal standards is common amongst our glorious traditional doctors. It all starts in medical school ... conditioning them to see compassion in killing people.
Wouldn't it be ironic if he developed dementia (in and out) and someone told him it was time to go and he couldn't express his desire to live?
#1. Comfort is not the deciding factor.
#2. As of Roe v Wade, we don't have the right to live. If we don't have the right to live, how can we have the right to die?
#3. I don't care how the bloody Europeans handle it. We've seen them let 14,000 people die from lack of air conditioning. We've seen them help kill 6,000,000 Jews and Catholics. Europeans are bloodthirsty, parochial savages who colonialized the Americas, Africa, and much of the Mid-east. They have all the moral authority of a cannibal with his grandma's leg still hanging out of his mouth.
LOL. Yepper.
The smart thing is to have a LIVING WILL. Express your wishes while you're competent adn have someone that you TRUST, nothing to gain, to have power of attorney.
Last Updated: 2003-03-12 14:00:21 -0400 (Reuters Health)
MUNICH, Germany (Reuters Health) - A young woman left in a coma for six years after she collapsed at school has started to respond to the world around her after her mother took her to see her pop star hero Bryan Adams perform live.
Christiane Kittel, now 24, was left in a vegetative state after her collapse on 12 June 1997. Doctors believe her condition was caused by a combination of hot weather, a hereditary haemophilia condition and side-effects of the contraceptive pill.
She had to be resuscitated three times, once at school and twice at the University Clinic in Regensburg, where she underwent surgery before being attached to life-support machines in the intensive care unit.
Later she was moved to the intensive care unit at the Clinic for Neurologic Rehabilitation in Regensburg, where her parents Karl-Gunther and Adelheide Kittel have kept a 15-hour watch by her bedside every day.
Her father, now 55, told Reuters Health: "We did not want her to be alone so we have spent every day by her bedside. We take it in turns, my wife does six hours than I take over for about six hours, there is usually someone there constantly between 5 AM and 8 PM."
"We have never given up hope of seeing our beloved daughter again," he said.
"Bryan Adams was always her biggest hero and she loved his music before she fell into a coma," said his wife Adelheid, 53. "When we heard about the concert in Regensburg we knew straight away that we had to take her there."
A local paper paid for the tickets and doctors arranged special help to get Christiane to the concert, her mother said.
During the concert, Christiane started to move in the wheelchair and was fascinated by the music and the singer.
"I will never forget it, I could have hugged the whole world. When we got back to the clinic she was still animated, and three times she called my name, she said Mama."
Head of the clinic Dr. Gerhard Weber, who has worked with Christiane for six years, confirmed that the concert had been a big leap forward for the young woman, but warned there was still a long way to go.
"I think there had been signs that she was starting to respond to the treatment she was getting before the concert and was no longer in a full vegetative state, but the concert certainly represented a big improvement," he told Reuters Health.
"There is a long way to go but I am very happy with the results of our experiment. It was the first time she had been out of the hospital apart from a single brief trip to her home. What she needs now is for the various therapies to continue and a lot of emotional stimulation including more trips home, for example.
"It's wrong to say it is a great miracle what happened here," Weber added. "But we have taken small steps and we are on the way to our goal."
But father Karl-Gunther takes another view: "I have no doubt that it was the concert that marked the turning point. She seemed to come alive when she was there, and clearly called out her mother's name. We now believe she is finally coming home to us."
The pro-death crowd would have killed her in a heart beat.
Maybe we can do some eugenics here now soon, too.
When Dr. Jack Kevorkian was constructing the suicide machine that would help Janet Adkins kill herself in 1990, he gave it a name which he thought described its function: the mercitron. It seems a strange name for a machine which manufactures death; but Kevorkian isn't the only one to use the name "mercy" to describe his trade. The popular term for physicians helping terminally ill patients to commit suicide is "mercy-killing." And there seems to be widespread consensus that when doctors assist some patients with suicide, they are doing a compassionate work. It's a new consensus detected by pollsters: According to a 1991 Roper poll surveying people in California, Oregon, and Washington, 60 percent say the law should be changed so doctors can legally help patients with suicide. And whereas 15 years ago, 53 percent of Americans said that suicide was always wrong, that figure now hovers at only 41 percent.[1]
But, along with the growing acceptance, even welcoming, of euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, have come increasingly dire warnings about the practice from ethicists and thinkers. Such prominent names as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, the late award-winning novelist Walker Percy, and the Jewish-Christian ethical group the Ramsey Colloquium have all explicitly warned that the new welcoming of euthanasia is a phenomenon fraught with danger. According to all three, the "mercy" offered by euthanasia can only be offered by those who, logically and emotionally, hold to a conception of the human person radically different from that of traditional medicine: the price of accepting euthanasia's "compassion" is denying that humans have any inherent worth apart from their productivity or utility. As Walker Percy says, such "tenderness" leads inevitably "to the gas chamber"-to societies in which the scope for "mercy killings" swells to include not only the terminally ill, but those deemed socially useless as well.[2]
This warning was perhaps most forcefully given by the Ramsey Colloquium, a periodic gathering of prominent Jewish and Christian ethicists and thinkers. In the wake of a November 1991 referendum in the state of Washington to decriminalize physician-assisted suicide-a referendum that came within 4 percentage points of victory-the group published a "Declaration on Euthanasia" to help fight the trend towards growing toleration of the practice. The Declaration reads in part.
...Euthanasia is contrary to our faith as Jews and Christians, is based upon a grave moral error, does violence to our political tradition, and undermines the integrity of the medical profession....In relating to the sick, the suffering, the incompetent, the disabled and the dying, we must learn again the wisdom that teaches us always to care and never to kill. Though it sometimes seems compassionate, killing is never a means of caring.[3]
For those involved in the Ramsey Colloquium, too, the "compassion" leading to mercy-killing is the first step towards a society in which the integrity of all life is abandoned.
Alleviating pain
For most Americans it may still seem a long way from supporting a right for voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill to a society where all respect for life is abandoned. Advocates of euthanasia, in fact, often argue that it is precisely their deep respect for human life that allows them to support suicide for the terminally ill. "No decent human being would allow an animal to suffer without putting it out of its misery," argues renowned author Isaac Asimov in a critic's blurb for the bestselling suicide manual Final Exit. "It is only to human beings that human beings are so cruel as to allow them to live on in pain, in hopelessness, in living death, without moving a muscle to help them."But what is the nature of this help that only supporters of euthanasia claim to be able to give?
All doctors are bound by their Hippocratic oath-and by the nature of their profession itself-to strive their utmost to alleviate suffering in their patients. Advocates of euthanasia argue that in some cases, the only remedy that can ease pain is one only they are willing to prescribe: death. Describing his client's most recent case of assisted suicide, Michael Schwartz, the lawyer for Dr. Jack Kevorkian, said the doctor was simply alleviating suffering in the only way left. "This is a case of medicine. It is a situation where the object was to alleviate the pain and suffering for patients who wish to have that pain and suffering put to an end."[4]
This may have provided an argument in favor of assisted suicide ten or fifteen years ago. But medical advances in the area of pain control now allow doctors to so completely soothe intense suffering that this argument for accepting euthanasia has become virtually useless. Advances in such devices as morphine drips and treated skin patches effectively guarantee that no terminally ill patient will suffer a painful death. According to Professor Robert Spitzer, a philosopher and authority on medical ethics: "Such significant advances have been made in the last two or three years by pain control experts that now it can be said with assurance that you will almost certainly not die an agonizing death. It can be said with assurance that total pain control may be had in the vast majority of the diseases leading to death."[5] Dr. Cecily Saunders, the founder of the modern hospice movement, argues that advances in pain control management have made the euthanasia option completely unnecessary.
Strangely enough, even advocates of physician-assisted suicide admit that traditional medicine can eliminate virtually all pain. Derek Humphry, author of Final Exit, amazingly concedes that doctors can eliminate virtually all pain for those who are terminally ill: "Certainly, modern pharmaceutical developments have provided us with wonderful analgesics, which, with shrewd management, control terminal pain in about 90 percent of the cases."[6] Even the most ardent supporters of a right to physician-assisted suicide admit their campaign is about far more than the relief of physical suffering.
If traditional medicine can now soothe the frayed nerves of the terminally ill and calm their broken bodies, what then is the appeal of euthanasia? Humphry gives the answer, one that should give pause to all who hold that euthanasia is solely about the relief of physical suffering.
[I]t is not just pain, or fear of pain, that drives people into the arms of the euthanasia movement. It is the symptoms of an illness, and often the side effects of medication, that damage the quality of people's lives...[A] person may not wish to live with throat cancer after the tongue has been removed and the face disfigured; or...if reading or watching television is the great comfort of life, loss of sight is a tremendous blow if added to the knowledge that death is impending.[7]
According to Humphry, doctors assisting in suicide are not just relieving unbearable physical agony. More importantly, they are claiming to end the psychic pains that often attend illness: the pain that can beset those who lose their beauty, their hobbies, their ability to be productive in the world.
Sources of human worth
In the traditional schema in which Western medicine was practiced, doctors did not have to worry about "curing," via euthanasia or anything else, a patient's diminishing value or worth-and that for the simple reason that the patient's value did not diminish, no matter how ravaged by illness or disease he or she might be. Human value, human worth, was not a product of some utilitarian calculus, which could be measured according to how active or talented or useful a person was. The intrinsic worth of each person was seen to be a simple given, a fact, inhering in that person for no other reason than that he or she was a creature made in the image and likeness of God.
Again and again in the foundation documents of Western society, we are brought face to face with the insistent doctrine that a person's worth is divinely given rather than socially conferred. It is a doctrine found both at the very beginning of the Christian and Jewish scriptures -
God created man in His image; In the divine image He created him; male and female He created them;
(Genesis 1:27)
-and in the document marking the establishment of what would later become the United States of America, our Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights...
It is a concept that takes on special significance for Christians. For the follower of Christ, not only do all people have value apart from their social function or usefulness: It is precisely those who are least esteemed in the human community with whom Jesus identifies Himself:
For I was hungry and you gave Me food, thirsty and you gave Me drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed Me, naked and you clothed Me, in prison and you came to visit Me. (Matthew 25: 35-36)
But this valuing of persons in themselves is not exclusive to Christians. In a speech on euthanasia, Professor Spitzer points out that even classical philosophy recognizes that a person' s worth is not defined by his function, but simply by his loving of the good:
For a moment we might think that we ought to produce, that by producing our lives have meaning. "Nay!" say the philosophers. By loving, by sensing the good, by being good as best we can, by trying to lead others to the good, trying to help others through the muck of life, and above all by sensing the good in the other and bonding them to ourselves-there we will find life's meaning.[8]
The literature of virtually all the peoples of the world echoes the sentiment more humbly. It rings out with exhortations at least for hospitality, for welcoming the stranger in one's midst. Since the stranger is one who by definition has no value within the new community, this near-universally acknowledged precept reveals that human value is seen as having another source.
This, then, is the political tradition to which the Ramsey Colloquium refers, the one which euthanasia does "violence" to by its very nature. Euthanasia depends for its very raison d'etre on the assertion that our value can be diminished by an impairing of our ability to be active or productive. It's an assertion that flies in the face of thousands of years of Western tradition
Lethal Consequences
What are the consequences of bucking the long-standing tradition that human value is inherent in the person, not a product of functionality? Ethicists are unanimous in predicting such a shift in values will extend the scope of cases in which euthanasia will be seen as legitimate. Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop has this to say:
I am convinced that in the 1930s the German medical sentiment favoring euthanasia (even before Hitler came to power) made it easier for the Nazi government to move society along the slippery slope that led to the Holocaust. The German euthanasia movement started with defective babies, then reached out to eliminate the insane, then to those suffering from senile dementia, then to patients with advanced tuberculosis, to amputees deemed of no further service to the Reich, to gypsies, to Poles, and finally to Jews. The Holocaust was upon us.[9]
Walker Percy similarly draws an analogy between the culture of euthanasia and the culture that spawned Nazism: In a word, certain consequences, perhaps unforeseen, follow upon the acceptance of the principle of the destruction of human life for what may appear to be the most admirable social reasons.
One does not have to look back very far in history for an example of such consequences. Take democratic Germany in the 1920s. Perhaps the most influential book published in German in the first quarter of this century was entitled The Justification of the Destruction of Life Devoid of Value. Its co-authors were the distinguished jurist Karl Binding and the prominent psychiatrist Alfred Hoche. Neither Binding nor Hoche had ever heard of Hitler or the Nazis.
Nor, in all likelihood, did Hitler ever read the book. He didn't have to. The point is that the ideas expressed in the book were the product not of Nazi ideology but rather of the best minds of the pre-Nazi Weimar Republic-physicians, social scientists, jurists, and the like, who with the best secular intentions wished to improve the lot, socially and genetically, of the German people-by getting rid of the unfit and the unwanted....[O]nce the line is crossed, once the principle is accepted- juridically, medically, socially-innocent human life can be destroyed for whatever reason...[I]t is not difficult to imagine an electorate or a court ten years, fifty years from now, who would favor getting rid of useless old people, retarded children, antisocial blacks, illegal Hispanics, gypsies, Jews...[10]
The language of Koop and Percy, and their analogy, are dramatic: they see a philosophical continuum between the culture that allows euthanasia and the culture that ultimately produced Nazi Germany. But the analogy is not far-fetched. Even doctors and ethicists who are not vehemently opposed to physician-assisted suicide in all cases worry that its legalization will lead to mounting pressure on the poor or crippled to choose it as an option-even if, left to themselves, they'd prefer life. Nancy Dubler and David Nimmons wonder: "If a patient were poor, would caregivers struggle so hard to control disease and pain if they had the option to end it all [through euthanasia]?[11] And Dr. Timothy Johnson, a medical editor for ABC News and a limited supporter of physician- assisted suicide, states that a clear danger of increased acceptance of euthanasia is "inappropriate pressure to terminate life for financial, family, or societal reasons that are not consonant with the best interest of the person..."[12
Real world scenarios
Those who are reluctant to accept the historical or logical arguments for euthanasia expanding its scope need only look at current events, particularly as they play out in the Netherlands, where euthanasia, though technically illegal, is officially tolerated.
Right now in Holland 3 percent of all deaths are directly caused by doctors. If that same percentage applied in the United States, deaths caused by doctors would amount to 64,860 a year.[13] What is more, according to a poll conducted by the Dutch government and released September 10, 1991, Dutch physicians now are performing two-and-one-half times more involuntary euthanasia than voluntary.[14] Involuntary euthanasia-murder-is still illegal in Holland, and the Dutch doctors register these deaths on death certificates as heart attacks or some other ailment. But according to a study by the Dutch government itself, the physicians are performing them-at two-and-a-half times the rate they perform the tolerated voluntary euthanasia.
Were euthanasia to be tolerated in other countries as it is in Holland, we could look for similar results. Already, pollsters have found that 90 percent of economics students support compulsory euthanasia for unspecified groups of people to "streamline the economy."[15] And even if such students fail in enacting laws actually mandating euthanasia, we have seen how the pressure already exists for the weak and unwanted to succumb. Some have already detected that pressure in action: of the first six people Dr. Jack Kevorkian helped to commit suicide, all were middle-aged women. Some ethicists explain this by saying that contemporary society makes women in particular feel unwanted and useless, subtly encouraging them to choose death. "The wording that is used very often by these women is that they don't want to be a burden," says Rachel MacNair, president of Feminists for Life of America.[16]
Such reports are leading more and more ethicists to remark that the slide down the slippery slope of assisted-suicide to active euthanasia in Holland is just a few years away from taking place here in America. As Professor Spitzer writes
If this progression of events can occur in Holland, why couldn't such a progression of events occur in the U.S? Once physicians suddenly see there is this easy way out, once they see there is no necessity of moving through the unpleasantness of telling somebody that they have to die, then why shouldn't they work to make euthanasia mandatory?[17]
This logic is leading even now to a culture that, in its zeal to erase suffering, will eradicate our humanity, our value, and ultimately our capacity to love. For Professor Spitzer and for others, the prognosis is not good:
This last scenario represents the total decline of culture. It is the epitome of a culture that no longer recognizes love or goodness to be the value of life. It is a culture that values only one thing: convenience, function, some kind of production beyond consumption. That is a crass utilitarian culture. And that is the culture we are trying to prevent.
Notes
Notes
[1] As reported in Ethics On Call, by Nancy Dubler and David Nimmons. Crown Publishing, 1992, p.l67.
[2] This is the theme of Percy's last novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987. See especially pp.358-362.
[3] Taken from the February, 1992 issue of Crisis magazine.
[4] "'Dr. Death' aids cancer patient with her suicide," Associated Press, Nov. 24, 1992.
[5] "A Reason to Die: Euthanasia comes to Washington State," Crisis magazine, October 1991, p.21.
[6] Final Exit, Derek Humphry. Dell, 1992, p.134.
[7] Ibid., pp. 21-22.
[8] "A Reason To Die: Euthanasia Comes To Washington State," op.cit., p.22.
[9] Let's Talk: An Honest Conversation On Critical Issues, C. Everett Koop and Timothy Johnson. Zondervan, 1992, p.46.
[10] Signposts in a Strange Land, Walker Percy, ed. Patrick Samway. Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1991. "An Unpublished Letter to the Times," pp.350-1.
[11] Ethics On Call, op. cit., p.172.
[12] Let's Talk, op. cit., p.44.
[13] Let's Talk, op.cit., p.54.
[14] "A Reason to Die: Euthanasia Comes to Washington State," op.cit., p.45.
[15] "Three Choices For Death," E. Catherine Moroney. America, November 21, 1992, p. 402.
[16] "Kevorkian draws criticism from medical ethicists," The Washington Times, Nov. 28, 1992.
[17] "A Reason To Die," p.45.
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So. Torture works.
When we play God and kill, we lose the chance to know God. As in when the man awoke from a coma at the last minute and began to speak when they were just about to kill him out of kindness. That was representative Harrington's father in law, he said.
Lots of other good stories on my FR page under the title "miracles", you have to scroll down for it.
1) If you had the energy to look at the timeline of lawsuits over the last 13 years, you wouldn't make such ridiculous assertion about how well the family got along with him until he decided to get on with his life. Which brings us to a second point ...
2) If he in fact had wanted to move on with his life (you like that twist on the 'quality of life, don't you) he could have divorced Terri and allowed the courts to appoint a guardian again ... Greer appointed M. Schiavo after M. Schiavo petitioned to have the state's appointed guardian removed because of protests that M. Schaivo wasn't paying for the rehabilitation the lawsuit had placed in a trust for her. Subsequently this smae judge Greer secretly permitted the plundering of the $750,000 trust, to pay the euthanasia atty, Felos. Which brings us to a third point ... follow the money. 3) As to 'moving on with his life', Michael has been cohabiting with another woman while still married to Terri and has fatehr one or two children with this other woman, yet wiill not divorce Terri. Wonder why he won't divorce the golden goose in order to 'get on with his life?' Oh, that's right! There's a life insurance policy with a double indemnity clause he is waiting impatiently to collect.
Oh yes, and something has to be done about the developmentally disabled, the blind, the crippled, vee really muzt do sumzing. Vee muzt find a solution for all zeese. Zey have no purpose, zey serve no funtion, zey are a burden on soziety, and zee State. Zey must be eliminated.......
On June 4, 1990, Jack Kevorkian attached Alzheimer's patient Janet Adkins to a homemade contraption in his 1968 VW bus, then watched her push the activating button that made her die. Public reaction was swift and generally negative. Judge Alice Gilbert, in barring Kevorkian from ever again using the device, charged that he "flagrantly violated" all standards of medical practice. She added that through arrogant and self-promoting "bizarre behavior" Kevorkian revealed that "his real goal is self service rather than patient service." Kevorkian's lawyer, Geoffrey Fieger, responded with an admirable non-sequitur: he claimed that Gilbert is "taking up the standard of fanatical anti-abortionists, people who wish to perpetuate suffering." As far as we know, the Kevorkian machine does not perform abortions.
The appearance of pro-life activists in the movement against euthanasia has been confusing to many. Opposing euthanasia does not seem to give opportunity for outlawing contraceptives, frowning on sex, keeping women out of jobs, or forced child-bearing--goals assumed to be central to the pro-life movement. Yet there is a connection. Both abortion and euthanasia make helpless people die.
Dying is not, in itself, the activity that pro-lifers so strenuously oppose. Death naturally occurs along the entire spectrum of life, from the earliest miscarriages to the centenarian's last breath. The objectionable activity is making people die: people who may be small, weak, or disabled, but are not dying; people who cannot defend or speak for themselves. The objection is to creating a an ever-widening class of unpersons, persons unwanted or imperfect, and imposing on those persons a duty to die.
Consider the following cases. While Nancy Cruzan was dying, the staff at Missouri Rehabilitation Center continued to insist that she was no vegetable. They had seen her smile at funny stories, cry when a visitor left, and indicate pain with her menstrual periods. She was not living on machines: a feeding tube had been inserted years before only to replace spoon feeding and make her care easier. An activist present during those days of dying commented, "It was like one of those horror movies where everybody in the town knows something, but nobody can get word out to the outside world." Information about Nancy's true condition was persistently blacked out while the staff endured the nightmare of watching her die.
In a horrible deja vu, another disabled woman at the Center has been selected for the same fate. Twenty-year-old Christine Busalacchi's condition is improving: she waves, smiles, objects to having her teeth brushed, vocalizes to indicate TV preferences, and very much enjoys visits from young men. This is not enough for her father, who has visited her seldom in the past two years (and then sometimes accompanied by TV cameras) and. we are told, stands to inherit $51,000 from her estate. Pete Busalacchi does not have the "clear and convincing evidence" necessary to have her starved in Missouri, so he is trying to have her moved to Minnesota where the standard is less stringent.
Dr. Ronald Cranford, the euthanasia advocate who hopes to help Pete Busalacchi take care of Christine when she is brought to Minnesota, had a similar case in 1979. Sgt. David Mack was shot in the line of duty as a policeman, and Cranford diagnosed him as "definitely...in a persistent vegetative state...never [to] regain cognitive, sapient functioning...never [to] be aware of his condition." Twenty months after the shooting Mack woke up, and eventually regained nearly all his mental ability. When asked by a reporter how he felt, he spelled out on his letterboard, "Speechless!"
Similar stories recur. Cancer patient Yolanda Blake was hospitalized last November 30 after experiencing severe bleeding. Despite the insistence of her sister and of the friend who held her power of attorney, the hospital refused to leave in a feeding tube or a catheter, and on December 14 the county judge ruled in the hospital's favor that Blake should be allowed to "die with dignity." On December 15 Blake woke up. When asked if she wanted to live, she responded, "Of course I do!"
Richard Routh, 42, was hospitalized with head injuries after a motorcycle accident. He had learned to signal "yes" and "no," could smile and laugh at jokes, when his parents and doctors decided to have him starved. A nurse's aide says that as they stood by the bedside discussing the starvation decision, Routh shook his head "no." Though the coroner's report says he dies of head injuries, he had lost thirty pounds during the hospitalization. The autopsy showed that he had not been given painkillers to ease the pain of starvation.
Washington State Senator Ray Moore represents more clearly than most the views of those who believe the disabled should want to die. He is supporting that state's Initiative 119, which would allow a doctor to give a poisonous injection to a terminally ill patient requesting it; he believes that his mother would have benefitted from such a service. He says that many people feel medical professionals profit "indecently" by caring for the dying, and we must grant that patience in the face of natural death can have a detrimental financial effect on the estate. But perhaps Moore is most honest when he says, "there is a growing aggravation with the sights and smells of hospitals and nursing homes."
It has been observed that sick and wounded animals do not commit suicide; when they are "put to sleep," it is to ease the pain of their owners. We may be horrified to contemplate life as a paraplegic, or brain-damaged, or unable to chew our own food. Yet once we are there, who is to say that the bits of life we still hold may not be incomparably sweet? The sound of the loved voice filtering through dim consciousness, the sweet breeze when windows are first opened in the spring, a long afternoon in the sun, may become precious tokens, eagerly held. A generation who once pondered the possibility of "alternate states of consciousness" should be especially sensitive here. Rita Greene has been in an unconscious state for forty years; Claire Norton, the nurse who has cared for her throughout those years, speaks of Rita as "a saint" whose life represents "a tremendous amount of mystery." Who can prove her wrong?
Kevorkian's lawyer misunderstands. Pro-lifers so not wish to perpetuate suffering. We do not wish to prolong dying--when they are only disabled or recovering or even merely old--we want to offer them loving support until the end. It may not make for a neat, tidy society where everyone is productive and attractive. But it does make for the only kind of humane and just society that we can imagine. by Frederica Mathewes-Green Reprinted from SisterLife
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