Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Life

There have been three cases in the past couple of weeks that fortell a future of ethical and personal dilemas regarding life and when it ends. The cases involve people making decisions for human beings that cannot speak for themselves. And they are a biproduct of technology and our inability to know absolute right and wrong.
In the firsts case was a 5 month old baby who was born with a birth defect that made life impossible without a ventilator. In Texas a hospital may turn the ventilator off if it deams such life sustaining measure futile. The mother of the baby did not want the ventilator turned off but the courts sided with the hospital and the babys life was terminated by the actions of the hospital despite the wishes of the babys parents.
The second case is far more famous. That of Teri Shaivo. In this case the courts have decided that 15 years of vegitablehood is enough and now the woman should die.
These cases present an ethical, moral, as well as legal dilema. In both cases human beings are being gotten rid of when their continued existance becomes too problematic for their sustainers to put up with. I am not saying that Mr. Shaivo does not love his wife. In his view there is no hope. He may verywell be right.
In my opinion, and that is all it is, there is no moral argument you can make to kill either human. Shaivo cannot tell us if she is in pain or not. The 5 month old could not do this either. Any argument in favor of killing these to people, and that is what we are talking about, is non-ethical. You could not scentance a murderer to death by starvation, but that is the fate, by court order, that awaits Shaivo. Of course she is brain dead and has no cortex left to experience this or anything else.
In both cases the parents do not want the human to be allowed to die. This is the parental perogative. It is a hardwired response set down by millions of years of evolution. However if there was one shred of legal documentation to support the woman's wish not to be sustained in her condition I would support her dying. But not by starvation. Yet there is no document. Only a conversation retold by her husband.
The moral absolutists have raided this drama and will use it as a toothing stone to get more conservative judges, never mind that the ones who are siding with Mr. Shaivo have been Bush and Regan appointees.
The Shaivo case is replayed over and over again in hundreds of thousands of families every year. As anyone who has dealt with the wasting away of a family member knows, death though instant, takes its own sweet time to happen. That is why so many Americans want Congress and the lifer goon-squad to stay out of this. In my father's case we could have opted for more blood transfusions. This may have postponed his death a week or so, or perhaps not. We made a collective decision not to ask for another one. Not that it was even presented as an option. These cases usually play themselves out with more or less the acceptance of death on all sides.
The third case seems oceans apart from the first two. It the case of Apachey Company in Iraq and a nightime shooting incident that left two parents dead and their children orphaned. In a war zone people get killed. We rationalize the deaths of civilians as part of the terrible cost of war. Instead of calling it what it is, murder. Family is trying to beat it home before curfew and runs into an American patrol. Patrol opens fire on car and people die, kids scream, wounds ooze blood. The soldiers that killed the couple and orphaned an entire family were back on patrol the next night. They are supposed to put the hell of war "in a box". Well all these guys are gonig to come home with very evil boxes that will have to be opened at some point. Somehow I doubt that most will have the aid of counseling when those boxes open up and the screams of orphaned children come out. Conservatives who are carrying signs for Shaivo turn a blind eye to this bloody mess. The majority of Americans don't seem to give a damn about all the terrorists we are creating. "I want to kill all the Americans and drink their blood." Said the 14 yearold daughter of the killed parents.
We are all lousy at determining when people should die. That is why most religions tell us not to kill.

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