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The Finality of Death: The Underlying Issue
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18059 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1990 |
3,018 Words |
| Author
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William A. Reinsmith
William A. Reinsmith is professor of humanities at the
Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science. |
In the spring of 1986, after two years of deliberation, the American Medical Association's Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs ruled that it is not unethical for doctors to discontinue all life-support for patients who are in an irreversible coma, "even if death is not imminent." The ruling proved controversial, because the council included food and water in the list of treatments that could be withheld. Around the time of the council's ruling, Time described the tragedy of Nancy Jobes, who had been living an irreversible coma for six years, since her oxygen had been cut off inadvertently during an operation intended to remove her dead fetus. Until the 1986 ruling, Jobes' husband and parents had been unsuccessful in their attempts to have her feeding tube removed. Time pointed out that about 10,000 other Americans share Nancy Jobes' predicament, living in a hopeless twilight known to doctors as a "permanent vegetative state."
The Karen Quinlan case showed us the horror of someone lying in a vegetative state for months against the wishes of her loved ones. Society imposes legal constraints because it wishes at all costs to preserve some form of life, or to avoid taking responsibility for termination of an individual existence. Cases like these are now legion, although, in the last few years, major court decisions in the United States have allowed more latitude to patients, physicians, and families.
Numerous critics within and without the medical establishment have asked whether, in our technological age, the age-old ethic of preserving life has metamorphosed into a need to control life, to let no scent of death intrude - especially in our decision making. However, the deeper issue, which sets rigid limits to the debate, is not the need to master death or the refusal to acknowledge its existence, gut rather technological society's belief in the utter finality of death.
An Alternative
In his book Beyond the Post Modern Mind, Huston Smith points out that science does not prove that higher realms of being do not exist. Rather, it concentrates so completely on the physical, material aspects of existence that other aspects of the universe - aspects that for centuries provided a meaning to life - have become unimportant and then completely forgotten. Smith argues that, in tailoring our thinking to meet the criteria of scientific "objectivity, prediction, number, and control,[we have] constricted our world view" and brought about alienation, in the light of this result, he says, "it seems only sensible to consider alternative
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