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Preserving a Life Whatever the Cost: 'Pious Balderdash'
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18457 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1990 |
3,898 Words |
| Author
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John Pickering
John Pickering, a partner in Washington, D.C.'s Wilmer, Cutler
& Pickering, is chairman of the American Bar Association's
Commission on Legal Problems of the Elderly. On behalf of the
American Academy of Neurology, he filed an amicus brief in
Cruzan v. Director of Missouri Department of Health. This is
an excerpt from Pickering's Leon and Josephine Winkelman
Lecture, given in April 1989, at the University of Michigan.
The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect
those of the ABA or its commission. |
Recent advances in medical science - the ability to prolong life by means such as respirators, dialysis, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, artificial nutrition and hydration, antibiotics and chemotherapy - have been both a blessing and a curse. They have saved many lives, but they have unnecessarily prolonged the natural process of dying for others, especially the elderly.
These new techniques are expensive and have added billions of dollars to our national healthcare costs. Accordingly, when and under what circumstances life should be prolonged by these means has been the subject of intense debate within the medical, legal, governmental, academic, and religious communities and in the courts of our nation.
Hundreds of articles have appeared in scientific, medical, legal, and religious publication and in the popular press. A presidential commission was convened to make recommendations, and Congress' Office of Technology Assessment has recently reviewed the legal and policy considerations. A consensus is emerging, but still the argument goes on between those who favor some measure of a right to die and those who are dedicated to preserving life at all costs.
From my work with the American Bar Association's Commission on Legal Problems of the Elderly and from sad personal experience with the terminal illness of my late wife, I have a strong bias in favor of the right to die under appropriate circumstances - or, as I prefer to call it, the right to refuse futile prolonging of the natural process of dying.
I also believe in the sanctity and value of life, but I reject completely the notion that life is too precious to put a value on and must be preserved at all costs. That notion is pious balderdash. We put programmatic values on life in the abstract every day by how we allocate social and economic resources, and it is mindless nonsense to pretend otherwise.
A century ago, two young Boston lawyers, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren, asserted in a seminal article in the Harvard Law Review that there is a common-law right of personal privacy - “the right to be let alone.”
Years later, the by-then Justice Brandeis followed up his article by asserting in his famous dissent in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928), that “the right to be let alone” is the “most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized
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