The Terminators
London Conference Reviews Widespread Deadly Care
by Anne Barbeau Gardiner
Religion must not be ignored if we are to treat human life with absolute respect and seriousness, said Irish Bishop Donal Murray, giving the opening address at the fourth annual conference of the Linacre Centre for Healthcare Ethics, held in London in early July. Without it, the scientific approach can lead to an inadequate idea of humanity and the “betrayal of trust” by those charged with caring for the incapacitated.
The reason, explained David Albert Jones, is that “personhood” today is defined as a status one can acquire or lose. This makes our common humanity subject to arbitrary tests, said Jones, professor of bioethics at St. Mary’s University College in London and author of The Soul of the Embryo.
Christianity, in contrast, teaches the equal dignity of receiving and giving, of weakness and strength. The test of personhood is not capacity but membership in the human community. For just as the Good Samaritan showed himself a neighbor by acting like one, so we discover ourselves as persons by cherishing the dependent.
Terminated Care
William Sullivan, a Canadian physician and director of the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, told how patients with disabilities have limited access to medical care because they cannot express their internal states. They die at a younger age from preventable causes like pneumonia or constipation for lack of personal support in seeking ordinary medical help.
That physician-assisted suicide will not be contained in its original boundaries can be demonstrated from the past 15 years of the Dutch experience, said Wendy Hiscox, lecturer in bioethics and medical law at St Mary’s. Violations of procedure become widespread, requirements are ignored or interpreted too widely, and access to suicide is extended to new categories: the mentally ill, the elderly weary of life, or patients with the beginnings of dementia.
Since 1990, there have been thousands of “life-terminating acts without explicit request,” and only one-fifth of such cases are ever reported. Moreover, prosecutions are rare, sentences lenient. In 2001, for example, a Dutch general practitioner who was convicted of killing an 84-year-old comatose patient at the urging of her daughters, even though the patient had said she wanted to live, got only a suspended fine.
Belgium legalized euthanasia only in 2002, but doctors are already performing non-voluntary euthanasia in cases of severe dementia and infant disability, Hiscox reported. Out of three hundred deaths of infants under a year old, half were from “active life termination.” Over 70 percent of physicians who were asked admitted that they had killed patients or were willing to do so in cases where they judged their patients’ quality of life inadequate.
Thus, she concluded, legal guidelines meant to bring the practice under scrutiny create a false idea of control. And as euthanasia spreads, social attitudes change towards old age and disability, so that the unthinkable gradually becomes the unexceptional.
Anne Barbeau Gardiner is Professor Emerita of English at John Jay College of the City University of New York. She has published on Dryden, Milton, and Swift, as well as on Catholics of the 17th century.
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