by Joseph R. Stanton, M.D.
In the movie "Judgement at Nuremberg", there is a poignant scene. The German Judge, sentenced to death, wishing somehow to justify himself to the American Jurist, begs him to visit him in jail before he returns to the U.S.A. As they pace up and down the corridor in that last encounter, the German says, "You must believe I never knew it would come to this." (all those deaths of the innocent and innocence). The American replied, "It came to this the very first time you knowingly allowed an innocent person to be put to death."
A long time has passed since a late night in New Jersey when a teenage girl entered an emergency room and history. Alcohol and drugs in vogue and involved, in those days, led to vomiting and asphyxia. Delivered to an emergency room, unconscious but resuscitated, the girl was placed on a ventilator and a feeding tube. The most oxygen-sensitive part of her brain, the cortex, remained permanently impaired. She was "in a persistent vegetative state" or "vegetative." After a period with no further improvement, the father of the girl sought Court permission to turn off the respirator. With permission granted and the patient refusing to die (even though medical testimony was almost unanimous that she would die), the father was asked, "Will you now clamp the feeding tube?" He replied, "No, that would be killing her." Karen Ann Quinlan continued to live for many years totally dependent until she died naturally. Yet, even as her tragic life continued, other Courts hearing cases of similarly distressed patients "at the edges of life" were giving permission to clamp off feeding tubes with inevitable death ensuing in a predictable way, in a predictable number of days.
In the meantime, an ethician in a leading American journal commented, "Cessation of nutrition may become the only effective way of making a certain large number of biologically tenacious patients actually die." Considering the fact that a short half century before, the Nazis had classified certain persons as useless eaters and exterminated them in a "crime against humanity," the very stones should have cried out, but they didn’t.
Beginning in 1984, a succession of feeding cases has proceeded through the Courts of the United States. Some patients have been comatose; some in what is described as "persistent vegetative state"; another was conscious yet demented (delightfully); while yet another was young, an illegal immigrant, conscious, but quadraplegic and depressed.
In Massachusetts, these cases were manifested "in the matter of Mary Heir (1984)," "Brophy v N.E. Sinai Hospital", and "in the Guardianship of Donald E. McCarthy" (1993). In Massachusetts vigorous defense by Attorneys Philip Moran, J.D., Robert LeDoux, J.D., Peter Gubellini, J.D., and John Duggan, J.D. produced decisions where Mary Heir and Donald McCarthy continued to be fed and lived until natural death occurred. A brilliant lower Court’s decision ordered Paul Brophy’s continued feeding, but a split Massachusettes Supreme Court decision overturned this humane and brilliant decision, the tube was clamped and death ordained.
In the Federal Feeding case of Nancy Cruzan, a split U.S. Supreme Court found in Roe and Doe’s right of privacy, a "right to die." Unlicensed pathologist, Jack Kevorkian, with his mercitron and canister of carbon monoxide for inducing death (excuse please, "treating pain"), scoffs at the law with impunity and over 40 people have died. The media hail the merchants of death: polls show the public and medicine are ready to welcome the ethic and era.
Except for cases of malnutrition, dehydration or vitamin deficiency, food and water do not treat disease. They do, however, sustain and support human life. Removal of food and water in the healthy or the ill leads inevitably to death with no exceptions. This is the road to which the feeding cases have led, while each day the very right to live is systematically denied to over 4000 tiny dependent human beings in the erstwhile sanctuary of a mother’s nurturing womb.
Pope John Paul II has accurately described all this as "The encroaching culture of death" and urged all to join in resisting it.
There was a Teacher who walked the shores of Lake Genesareth. He preached that imprinted on all who live and breathe no matter how obscured or marred or disfigured by disease or illness, there is imprinted Imago Dei, the Image of God. He taught that a cup of water given to "these My least brethren" in His name would bring eternal life. The challenge to doctors, nurses, health care personnel, families, indeed to each of us, is to act as if we really believe Him, and to care for the sick, the suffering, and the dying without questioning their worth or ours.
Great post, MarMema, thank you for the ping.
I once wrote an editorial about the basic problems in medicine, not particularly related to euthanasia, but to the loss of the soul and foundation of western medicine. You can read it here: