Extraordinary means:
Garvey, John
OF SEVERAL MINDS John Garvey EXTRAORDINARY MEANS APPROACHING THE ABYSS IN MICHIGAN Doctor Jack Kevorkian has been in the news a lot recently. He has invented a machine that allows people to kill...
...We aren't allowed to back away from this one.k away from this one...
...That painful middle ground may be the most we can hope for...
...He pointed out the pressures to see these questions in the most brutal economic terms: It is expensive to keep someone alive in a vegetative state...
...There's obviously a need for this," he told the New York Times...
...Believers, precisely as believers, can't accept this...
...I can understand those fears viscerally, and know why in his final illness Kafka told his doctor, "If you won't kill me, you're a murderer...
...It is the line between denying and recognizing that life is not ours to control, nor is the value of life dependent upon our recognition of that value, nor is its quality-that is, its similarity to our definitions of a desirable life-the most important thing about it...
...If I find my own life burdensome, or a potential burden to others, I may end it...
...The death of the body is not the worst thing that can happen to me...
...I can understand the desperation and unhappiness of Mrs...
...Adkins and some of her family...
...I never eat lunch that way...
...and a middle ground will be painful to both...
...But to see what is sacred in any human life (including the life of the condemned mass murderer) is part of our human vocation...
...I can't think that allowing someone to die without using such methods-or even by removing a tube-is morally the same thing as active euthanasia...
...I sympathize with something my father said a couple of years ago...
...Not all of us get pregnant against our wills or have to deal directly with that difficult subject...
...I haven't made a living will, but I think I should...
...Sacredness would be a better word here than sanctity, which is a quality not found in many human beings...
...Some of those brainwashed ethicists have been startled by Dr...
...He has invented a machine that allows people to kill themselves...
...It is religious (or at least philosophical in a way that approaches religion) because it engages us in assessing the most fundamental values people live by, as slavery did, as the use of weapons for mass destruction does...
...It is much harder, at times almost impossible, to see life's holiness in the suffering of someone comatose or the dreadful decline of an Alzheimer's patient than it is to see the glory of life in an infant or growing child or healthy adult...
...While I believe that Christians should not rely on law, a coercive thing, but should emphasize persuasion, even in the most serious cases, it is important to see why these particular issues test the limits of pluralism...
...A woman named Janet Adkins, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, has made him famous by proving that the machine works...
...Kevorkian before...
...It is...
...It is important, though, not to oversimplify what is involved here...
...Kevorkian-a man who sounds in interviews like those intense people who spend their lives in public libraries, looking for evidence to prove that World War II never happened or that the earth is actually another planet of the same name-believes that something different has been demonstrated: a real need for his product...
...a great many of us have living parents who might spend time suffering in hospitals or hospices...
...That desire is apparently an essential part of our fabric...
...To say that nothing can be done socially, that we should succumb to the prochoice argument in the areas of abortion and euthanasia, is in effect to enshrine View Two-as definite a philosophical stance as any religion ever was-in law, without challenge...
...There are cases in which people thought to have been hopeless are not, and recover...
...The belief that one can refuse to have one's life continued by "extraordinary means" is complicated by such things as the feeding tube...
...Is this the same thing as starving a person to death...
...When prolife people insist that euthanasia, or the question of abortion, is not a religious question they are wrong...
...Let's call this View One...
...To preserve life at all costs is a terrible thing, and arguably unchristian...
...For a Christian this is a matter of faith-which is to say, it is not a subjective feeling, but something we believe to be as real as gravity or light...
...I think this is all that was proven here...
...Call this View Two, recognizing that between View One and View Two there are degrees of agreement or disagreement with either pole...
...As a Christian, I believe that my life is not my own...
...Alzheimer's is a particularly cruel disease...
...I want my family to know that I don't want to be kept alive that way...
...But is it right to withdraw a tube from a person who is comatose, with no chance of recovery...
...They speak of the sanctity of human life...
...The pictures we have been given of her show a self-determined woman, the sort often called "plucky" (isn't it interesting that people seldom use that word for men...
...According to the Times, he was forced to leave the University of Michigan Hospital after officials learned of his proposal to make death-row inmates permanently unconscious for purposes of medical experimentation...
...many of us have wives or husbands for whom difficult decisions may have to be made...
...let's not make it easier on them, he said...
...He also wants to see reusable organs removed from the executed-why should anything go to waste...
...Moral arguments will be used-abused, actually-by some bioethi-cists in order to allow people to pursue goals that have less to do with morality and genuine compassion than with the economic bottom line and personal convenience...
...I can understand why someone would want to die rather than live at the end of life-support systems, comatose, or would want to die rather than feel the self-the only self you ever knew-being canceled by the invasion of Alzheimer's disease...
...People who oppose both argue that life has an inherent value...
...The fact that it is, is a mystery, one we must revere...
...Sacredness inheres in all of us, because we would not exist if we were not loved by God...
...Mrs...
...People call him all the time, he says, asking for his help in killing themselves...
...It should be...
...Life will be dealt with as if it were in fact without inherent value, and I will be given the choice to disagree privately...
...All of us will die...
...Why should I care what brainwashed ethicists and nonthinking physicians say...
...Adkins had done that, apparently, even before the onset of Alzheimer's, but not as a disguised way to end it all...
...May I impose these views on others, who are not believers...
...and there is certainly a thin line between active enthanasia and allowing someone to die, even withdrawing support where the person's wishes are clear...
...That line, however, is essential...
...Value is given to us, regardless of how we feel about it...
...many of us have children who may be called on to make difficult decisions about us...
...If you thought abortion was a tricky and controversial subject, keep an eye on this one...
...Neither side can win this one absolutely without eclipsing the other...
...There are also, my friend said, bad doctors out there for whom a relatively easy attitude towards turning off respirators and pulling feeding tubes will be a positive boon...
...To the extent that religion does not address such problems it is of little or no use to us, ethically...
...There is divine meaning there...
...If I believe that a new life cannot, sometimes for very serious reasons, be welcomed into my own life, I may end it...
...It may indeed be faithless, as well as cruel, to keep a suffering person alive at all costs...
...who wanted to be in charge of her life to the very end...
...This seems an example of extraordinary means to me...
...polls show many if not most Americans agreeing that people ought to be assisted in suicide, if suicide should be their desire, and a fair number of physicians agreeing with them, and another fair number of doctors admitting that they had in fact helped people toward their deaths...
...But we all knew that...
...Kevorkian may be...
...It is not, however, a denominational question...
...There is no question here of life-the life of a fetus or my own-having an inherent value, something so sacred that it is not up to me to decide its fate...
...Nor is the life of an unborn child (human, or potentially human-however one wants to define it) a thing without value...
...It would not be, if it were not loved...
...I talked about all of this with a doctor whose opinion I respect...
...The existence of people like Dr...
...therefore, pull the plug...
...The alternative, I'm afraid, is that their view will be imposed on me and on the rest of society...
...If I'm ever diagnosed as having Alzheimer's," he said, "I'll take up hang-gliding...
...View Two has always regarded religion as a matter of taste, an entirely personal choice, which can be accepted as long as it does not present a forceful challenge to View Two...
...Something unites the issues of abortion and euthanasia...
...Kevorkian could be taken as a sign that God has a sense of humor, even if it may, on occasions like this, be darker than our own...
...Medical advances have made dying a much longer process for many suffering people...
...There is an important moral and social issue here, however bizarre Dr...
...Those who argue for the moral acceptability of abortion or euthanasia as a matter of right, because people have the right to choose, define life as valuable to the extent that it is welcomed by the community, or for that matter by oneself: my life, my body, is a kind of property with which I may do what I will...
...As in the case of abortion, this has to do with questions so basic they test pluralism...
Vol. 117 • August 1990 • No. 14
