Regulating Death
Marty, Martin E.
DEATH IN HOLLAND REGULATING DEATH Euthanasia and the Case of the Netherlands Carlos E Gomez, M.D. Free Press, $19.95, 172 pp. Marlin E. Marly hildren sometimes play with a game board...
...their choices must be utterly voluntary...
...The legal status of the act is itself unclear...
...These essays are both lamentation and celebration...
...Should physicians ever, under any circumstances or in any terms, be in the killing business...
...The Dutch may have a reputation for precision and scrupulousness, but it is hard to see this good name sustained in the case of euthanasia...
...Diagnosing the Modern Malaise" is, in part, about the parallels between the literary-diagnostic method Chekhov used almost a hundred years ago and the strategy of the contemporary novelist who knows something is radically wrong in "a society...overtaken...by fragmentation rather than wholeness...
...ARGUING WITH MODERNITY SIGNPOSTS IN A STRANGE LAND Walker Percy Edit~l with an introduction by Patrick Samway Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25, 428 pp...
...Why...
...A second criterion: there must be "unbearable suffering...
...Kass asks this with and for us...
...The essays build on that fascination...
...Converse with fellow-citizens and you will likely find that not a few, perhaps most of them, play a kind of "yes" and "no" game in respect to euthanasia...
...The player holds a stick at the end of which is a string at the end of which, in turn, is a ball...
...in public policy from the University of Chicago, who combines the conscience of an alert physician with the analytic skills of the informed academic, came home unimpressed...
...Throughout these meditations, Percy reminds us that"one's self is always a leftover from one's theory...
...As exceptional case after exceptional case makes its way to prime-time television panels, where spokespersons representing both sides or all sides are given equal time and all sound equally credible, it becomes ever easier to picture the normalization of pro-euthanasia policies and practices...
...Next comes a more aggressive sort of killing...
...She focuses on the concept of mothering in terms of us as individuals and its potential benefits for a church that serves our deepest human needs today...
...then they confront a situation of agony or meaninglessness in the face of which an unbidden tug pulls them toward a "yes": euthanasia may look like a proper course...
...Many of the essays explore Percy's conviction that we must celebrate where we choose to be...
...His diagnosis of our spiritual homelessness frequently parallels Christopher Lasch's, who argues that our modem dependence on the therapeutic or so-called "helping profession" is symptomatic of our shrunken or "minimal self...
...These varied essays provide a clearer picture of the Louisiana doctor-writer fascinated with facts about the eternal verities as well as the epistemological necessity of regional and particular attachments...
...In "Culture, the Church, and Evangelization," written for a 1988 Vatican symposium, he argues that "the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished" and the church, "guarding the sacred deposit of the faith amid the tumultuous crosscurrents of culture and history," must serve "as the yeast which leavens the cultural lump...
...These initially disconnected pieces, superbly edited by Patrick Samway, add significantly to Percy's total accomplishment...
...Victor A. Kramer p ercy's"signposts" guide the modem wayfarer through an arid post-Christian world, one saturated with epistemological theories that this diagnostician-novelist is convinced are radically incoherent...
...Marlin E. Marly hildren sometimes play with a game board which putatively reveals to them opinions they are not sure they know how to read and hold...
...though they desire to carve a "private space" to assist individuals in dying, their staffs gradually develop policies which compromise the whole notion of voluntariness...
...But hospitals are public institutions...
...A clue to where the argument comes out is evident in the early pages where the author of the foreword leads the reader into the argument...
...His queries about the Civil War, racism, and integration are ultimately not limited to peculiarities of the South, for he sees in these regional questions metaphors for how all might live...
...Do I want a new bicycle instead of a week at camp...
...Percy's nonfiction pieces, which document a thirty-odd-year search for answers by a bemused questioner, can be described as his songs in a strange land: "The Psalmist said sing a new song, and, for a fact, the old ones are pretty well worn-out...
...Anyone who has dealt with a range of patients knows how relative such a term may be...
...Some may make up their minds that it is always wrong, always wrong...
...Science, Language, Literature...
...Off to camp...
...Percy's appreciation of particular places (Covington, New Orleans, Georgia, Mississippi) is far from quaint, but rather affectionate and idiosyncratic...
...His testimony is a clearly cautionary and even emphatic "no": no, don't believe those who take courage and comfort from the Netherlands pioneering...
...The subjects of euthanasia, according to the Netherlands policy, have to be asserting autonomy...
...Percy announces that humankind has surrendered the sovereignty of the soul for the pottage of the modem "personality...
...Sooner or later, through a semiinvoluntary impulse, the ball is to swing toward the proper zone...
...Percy's argument with modem culture is linked to what he thought was humankind's ontological loss of self in a world where distractions (everything from myriads of theories to overwhelming quantities of consumer goods) increasingly compel people to in some sense forget about themselves...
...Taking testimony should be more of a problem for those who have previously leaned toward endorsement of relaxed policies, as they read Gomez's report on and ponder with him the situation in the Netherlands...
...Who is to discern the proper point on the scale at which assisting in bringing on death addresses a kind of objective state of "unbearable suffering...
...Kass and Gomez, unless they are mere pessimists, must believe that their voices, raised at this stage, might counter the trends in an erosive time...
...Will all my declarations be indeed "voluntary," my "unbearable" sighs be misheard, my signals misread...
...This book collects forty-four pieces and is arranged in four sections: Life in the South...
...Gomez, who spent a month observing and interviewing in Amsterdam, finds there anything but clarity and care...
...Or others of them decide that it can sometimes be justifiable...
...Yet history is also full of counter-pulls, as if against the force of gravity...
...Already in 1957 he sur666: Commonweal...
...Percy analyzes what seems to be so wrong, buthe also hopes that through art, literature, reading, even the imaginative use of television, we might find our way out of the desert...
...then a case makes the headlines in which those who appeal to justifiability engage in lifecheapening acts...
...That nation stands alone among the nations in its practice of permitting such physician-assisted termination (or killing, if you will), and it is often pointed to as the enlightened pathfinder for other nations...
...euthanasia turns out to be a matter more winked at by the courts (since 1973) than formally legitimated by law...
...Gomez, a medical resident at the University of Virginia and the holder of a Ph.D...
...and an epilogue, interview, and self-interview...
...Itexpands our consciousness about mothering.'" --Sidney Callahan Paper $11.95 8 November 1991:665 physician, who is known for concerning himself with basic issues that have to do with the medical profession...
...And the basic one in this case is trust...
...Sometimes people raise standards, inconvenience themselves, put the common good ahead of private comfort...
...Gomez does not rely on a ouija-boardlike "yes" and "no" device to find his mind and offer counsel...
...Dare I enter a kind of covenantal relatio~l with a physician if there is the hazard that she is to become the agent of my death...
...Henceforth: "no...
...Here, Percy outlines the dilemma of a novelist whose job is to report "that the modem world has ended, the world.., informed by the optimism of the scientific revolution, rational humanism, and that Western cultural entity which...it has been more or less accurate to describe as Christendom...
...They and those who follow them will now have to develop their own argument further to show how it, in the end, may be more humane than are the increasingly casual policies of support for physician-assisted death, for active euthanasia...
...He is Leon Kass, another MOTHER CHURCH What the Experience ol women Is Teaching Her SALLY CUNNEEN PAULIST PRESS 997 Macarthur Blvd., Mahwah, N.J...
...A fine reflection on what all human beings can do to nurture one another...
...Gomez finds reason to support the "slippery slope" school of thought: start on a course of casually defined "passive euthanasia" and soon there is a move toward mild "active euthanasia...
...For the moment, Gomez is content to let the cases in the Netherlands speak largely for themselves...
...While such uncertainty does continue to color the minds of thoughtful people who take testimony from many sources, there seems also to be in our culture what Carlos F. Gomez, a physician, calls an "inexorable" motion toward easing moral and legal strictures against physician-aided death...
...Morality and Religion...
...07430 1-9nl-825-7300 What the Experience of Women is Teaching Her In this provocative new book, Sally Cunneen draws on the traditional Catholic symbol of "mother church" as it has existed for centuries and reinterprets and reimagines it as it applies to the life of the contemporary Christian church...
...Perhaps laws are vague because, the doctor concludes, few of the people he interviewed, statements he read, or cases he studied suggested that those responsible had any clear definition of euthanasia in the first place...
...They might pull more minds than one toward the "no" pole in a time when the "yes" has begun to look increasingly acceptable on both sides of the Atlantic...
...Carlos Gomez took such questioning with him into the clinics of the Netherlands and came back with empirical evidence-not the last word, to be sure, but an important word--suggesting that trust breaks down, terms lose their meaning, and, in the name of dignity and autonomy, something important to the community and integral to definitions of human dignity tends to be lost in the blur of Netherlandish practices...
...On the left of the board is a "Yes" zone and on the right a "No...
...Percy, who died last year, had long been fascinated by questions about language and its relation to the mystery of human existence (see The Message in the Bottle, Lost in the Cosmos...
...The slippery slope notion may reveal a philosophy of history which implies a relentless pull away from concern for human life...
Vol. 118 • November 1991 • No. 19
