Hard Choices/Life Choices

...No easy task...

...medical technology in the form of ventilators has forced the legal system to embark upon uncharted legal waters of the so-called right-to-die issue...

...Colen's Hard Choices and Howard Levine'sLi/e Choices is the former's presentation of the size of the task confronting us as individuals in a pluralistic society...

...Colen, science editor forNewsday, is a Pulitzer winner for his work on the Baby Jane Doe case...

...Our dilemma, in its more basic form, poses the question whether we ought to do medically everything that we can do medically...

...The result is that, as a society, we are frequently at a loss to know what to do...

...As a journalist, however, his coverage of biomedical ethics goes back to the landmark case of Karen Ann Quinlan in 1976...

...She co*(tuthored (with Allen Russell) Metaphork Process {Texas Christian U...

...The essential merit in B.D...

...While these are obviously medical dilemmas, they are also inescapable social dilemmas that tend to pit the freedom of individuals against the common good of society...

...LIFE CHOICES Howard Levine Simon and Schuster, $17.95, 263 pp...

...T. Patrick Hill Recent advances in medical science and technology have reached such a level that we are tempted to speak of them as miracles, and not without some justification...

...aggressively treat the terminally ill or the imperiled new-born...

...For example, should a terminally ill patient be permitted to reject a life-prolonging ventilator even at the risk of offending society's sense of the sanctity of life and nudging it closer to the slippery slope called death on demand...

...Medical technology applied, for example, to organ transplantation has required the medical profession to redefine death...

...and medical technology at work in genetic engineering is now positioning the human race so that it may participate actively in its own evolution...

...a^uthois*, ^pecificaUy those . *$vie*^ed fere*, V«seflt as with varia^ tioas ^t^ihe...

...We can (but ought we...

...And if these dilemmas cannot be avoided, neither can the need to resolve them in ways that, within reason in a morally pluralistic society, respect the rights and values of all citizens, and that promise a basic social harmony after legislation and public policy have been adopted...

...By virtue of technology, medical care can now begin in utero and continue through the most extreme stages of terminal illness...

...250: Commonweal...

...The developments have been so dramatic that they appear to outrun public policy, civil legislation, and ethical expectations...

...Philosophers have been called upon to engage these matters with a new discourse called bioethics...

...foregoittg themes of, Pmyth'5JCUnataj8iallas, for example, , ^d^lh^l^afels -''stories from cultures and jpeligious traditions that help us fee^Siie a^a^jf our true selves.' * "~in |us^|fe^0j»fe, Heroes, and ^^k^^Caflas Inds these figures'" ""at^th^v^'cor^pf oursejves/' Wh^f^lisc^vet^ad affirai them withl«^%vU^glvE substance to oor AQtV^fiRHART teaches hetmeneutks, religion and literature at Habart and WilHam Smith Colleges in Geneva, New Yprk...

...At a recent conference (Continued on page 252) 24 April 1987: 249 Mpersists in spite of Rudolf Buftmann's program of demythologization in the 1940s...

...The fundamental difficulty such dilemmas pose, for the present at least, is that society cannot continue or decline the use of modern health care without dealing with the acute questions raised when technologically applied health care intersects with human values — dignity and autonomy in particular...

...One of the most interesting sources of confusion in contempo3 raryteHgjOB&itooiugbt is jn the use of the temr%ytfr-" Jii*er*ook, The He<xw$$exii949\ v?hieh influenced femjnistt&eijlogy early in the 1950s, SintoiSe*4e "B€aifv;oir laments that woraeii«**Jia\4 erected no vjrile myth in Whi|^ ^feir p^jecis m teflected/t * and^bafthey J>s%lfdreab through the dreams ^j|ien?* D^eauvoir treats ^'iay^j/^as'^,fun^%}nal past"of selfr coaffiQti8ile% \ " "^^oseaj^y Roether's Sexism and *P&^T^|fe||X, however, ^myth'* «raefe^^.*f§ieStffog «tory which H itiask^ di|fe'|ent,taie situation — in ; Myfh^fGodSyiteroetj and Saviors, by rjtJieXsl^^'forli^ample, that the myth ^f the ot||in V evil faasks a destruc?&r\J^0Smfj^ *'g#od" versus - V&yl#%|e^er'-Sabstitutes,the term "n|dri^*^«p|raally, ahaggadic or !fta1a»^^>|^tio«;of a* text) and rel ttk}$^hi$toit£of creation from a . fet®«ttsti.pi#^^tive to overcome the % Eni^understahdings generated from the Geft?stsriayt^ ," , ' ' ^flfeij...