Harpers: The religious right and the right to die

the alarms raised in America’s ongoing right-to-die debate have always been characterized by a curious selectivity. You will notice, for example, how the fear of playing God operates exclusively on one side of the medical playground. Thus to help a patient end his or her life “prematurely” is playing God, while extending it in ways and under conditions that no God lacking horns and a cloven hoof could ever have intended is the mandate of “our Judeo-Christian heritage” and the Hippocratic oath. Let someone like Dr. Thompson step out of bounds to honor the spirit of his patient’s advance directives, and we will be told that he is eroding respect for the medical profession. But in cases involving a medical professional who blatantly ignores such directives, we are reminded that doctors don’t always have time to review patient files while making difficult decisions. They’re not God, after all.
When former Attorney General John Ashcroft thrice challenged the Oregon Death with Dignity law, threatening to prosecute participating physicians under DEA regulations (a threat that now stands at the bench of the Supreme Court), nobody mentioned the dangerous course toward theocratic despotism—or rather some did mention it, though their voices were effectively drowned out by larger moral concerns, such as those occasioned by the sight of Janet Jackson’s breast or a gay groom’s boutonniere.
When the Vatican issued its 2004 statement against the removal of feeding tubes from vegetative patients, a development that has even conservative ethicists and devout Catholic physicians slapping their foreheads in disbelief, few commentators spoke about returning to a day, no farther back than the 1970s, when a dying patient who begged not to be intubated would have her wrists tied like those of a condemned witch so that she could not pull the instruments of salvation from her body. Instead we are told that time will be required “to reflect upon the ruling”—time that translates in concrete human terms to a slow and horrible death.