Reply #88: But when the family disagrees? [View All]

[recidivist]

I sympathize with the hard choices you had to make about your mother. None of us want to be faced with these decisions, but modern medicine makes the prospect increasingly common. Tough calls have to be made. People are disconnected from respirators and feeding tubes are removed every day in America without controversy. But in these cases, the family and caregivers have typically reached agreement that the time has come.

The question posed by the Schaivo case is how to resolve bitter disagreement among the family (and others close to the situation). The husband has wanted her dead from the start. The parents, supported by several of her former caregivers and others who have interacted with Terri, think she should not be killed. Ugly situation.

I've not been online much in recent weeks (new job and more restrictive internet rules, so I'm not around at all during the day), so please excuse me if the Baby Jane Doe comparison has already been talked to death. That was a landmark euthanasia case 25 years ago, and it got highly politicized, largely along pro-life/pro-choice lines (despite the fact that the baby was already born).

Anyhow, what has too often been left out of the Baby Jane Doe discussion is any reflection over HOW the case got started. On the left, it turned into a big bash-Reagan issue -- you know, that evil R.R. sending his minions out to Bloomington, Indiana to prevent a grieving family from medically executing a disabled baby girl -- but that's miles down the road.

The human face of the case was much closer to home. What happened, in fact, is that a nurse at the hospital objected to killing a Downs Syndrome baby. (The baby had a couple of other problems too, but those could and would have been routinely treated absent the Downs Syndrome. Downs was the killing issue.) The nurse, supported by various family, friends, and coworkers, walked into the county attorney's office saying that the hospital was wrongfully killing an infant, and things escalated from there.

Now, one can sympathize with the birth parents, who had several other children, feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of dealing for the rest of their lives with a disabled child. But does that give them a license to kill? What added a special edge to the situation is that, after Baby Jane Doe's case was publicized, many people rallied to her cause and offered to pay for her medical care and/or to adopt her.

So the final question became: how to you justify killing a disabled person despite the fact that responsible parties are willing to assume the burden of her care? When there is disagreement among interested and knowledgable parties, I would err on the side of life. Up to a point.

I hate to reduce such cases to a cash nexus, but at some point -- years in a coma are a good example -- that may become necessary. Sooner or later, whoever is paying the bills should have something to say about it too. I've not paid enough attention to the Schaivo case to know if Terri's parents (or outside groups) are willing to foot the bill, or if they assume Medicaid is going to pay forever on. If the latter, I suppose it is Jeb Bush's and the Florida legislature's decision to make.