Murder or mercy? The debate over active euthanasia has only just begun
✍ Scribed by Steve Heilig
- Publisher
- Springer
- Year
- 1991
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 220 KB
- Volume
- 3
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0956-2737
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
It has become one of our most common and frightening personal and collective nightmares: To find oneself lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to any number of machines, unable to move or speak or otherwise communicate with anyone. Perhaps in this nightmare we are completely unconscious, in a comal alive only in body and by the cruel grace of modern medical technology -in other, cruder parlance, a "vegetable."
Many people end up in this terrible situation suddenly and unpredictably -as victims of automobile accidents, for example. But more often, we have some advance notice of the possibility of losing control of our mind and body. For most of us, the spectre approaches with the inexorable march of time, through the aging process and a slow deterioration of health. But the risk if not limited to the elderly debilitating diseases such as cancer or AIDS can and does strike at any age. There are thousands of people in beds across the nation with little or no awareness of who or where they are, their hearts kept beating and their lungs pumping by the often mixed blessing of artificial life support.
Recently, Jack Kevorkian, M.D. of Michigan arrived on the scene with a proposed answer to many of these problems -a "suicide machine." After hooking up 54-year old Janet Adkins, who presumably no longer wished to face the terrible progression of her Alzheimer's disease, he watched as she pressed a button allowing the machine to first deliver a drug to render her unconscious, and then another drug to end her life (1).
The pushing of that button also triggered a front-page uproar, with predictably confusing and conflicting results. Legal authorities have been far from unified in their responses -was this murder, suicide, or assisted suicide? The Hemlock Society praised Ms. Adkins and Dr. Kevorkian as "torchbearers" for the right to die (2). On the other side, in an unusual alliance, some medical and ethical experts quickly joined with self-proclaimed "right to life" activists in denouncing