Common Sense Political Thought

Via our friends at the Delaware Liberal and then Steve Newton, I found this story (twice removed) in the Jerusalem Post:

Canadian judge to rule on Jew facing euthanasia
Judy Siegel-Itzkovich , The Jerusalem Post, Jan. 6, 2008

A Canadian judge is due to decide this week whether to renew a temporary injunction against Winnipeg’s Grace General Hospital, whose doctors want to detach an 84-year-old Orthodox Jew from a respirator and hasten his death, against his family’s wishes.

However, it was learned Sunday that the patient, Samuel Golubchuk, regained consciousness several days ago and appears to be improving.

Although a hospital doctor treating Golubchuk wrote “Awoke” on his chart, the hospital did not disclose this to the court. The family said the hospital had been trying to make the patient appear to be dying and with minimal brain function. Grace General Hospital has received the backing of the Canadian Medical Association in its efforts to bring about active euthanasia.

According to the chart, which the judge was apparently not shown, the supposedly “imminently dying” Golubchuk is not only awake but has interacted with people and made purposeful movements.

The case has aroused anger and anxiety within the North American Jewish community that it will set a precedent for doctors to have exclusive power over life and death decisions. Rabbinical and community leaders worry that budget-conscious hospital systems may decide to shorten patients’ lives to save money or to free up beds.

The US Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists discussed the case at its annual meeting in New York two weeks ago, and passed a resolution expressing grave concern about this case. Agudath Israel of America has also expressed concern.

Prof. Shimon Glick, a leading Israeli medical ethics expert and former dean of Ben-Gurion University’s Health Sciences Faculty, said: “From a halachic point of view, removing a feeding tube from a patient who has any brain function is active euthanasia, equivalent to murder… But here, in addition, unless the patient has specifically indicated by advance directive that such is his desire, one has a violation of the patient’s autonomy, as well.”

A Grace General Hospital lawyer told the court that doctors “have the sole right to make decisions about treatment – even if it goes against a patient’s religious beliefs.”

Thaddeus Mason Pope wrote, on his site Medical Futility:

Siegel’s title, Canadian Judge to Rule on Jew Facing Euthanasia, seems to be deliberately provocative. But, then again, it may be apt. This is, after all, non-consensual killing based on judgments about quality of life worth living. There are important material distinctions between this case and Nazi activities. But the similarities between cases like Golubchuk’s and those in Binding & Hoche’s Die Freigabe der Vernichtung Lebensunwertem Lebens¹ (1920) should be explicitly recognized and addressed.

In their book, professor Karl Binding, retired after forty years at the University of Leipzig, and Alfred Hoche, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, argued that those unworthy of continuing to live included the incurably ill, people who were mentally retarded and seriously deformed children. Dr Hoche postulated “that perhaps one day we will come to the conclusion that the disposal of the mentally dead is not criminally nor morally wrong, but a useful act.”

Apparently Herr Doktor Professor Hoche’s suggestion that “perhaps one day” we will come to such a conclusion has been realized, in our present day. Samuel Golubchuk had supposedly reached that state, and the good physicians at Grace General Hospital had concluded that it was time to terminate his life, even against the wishes of his family, with the hospital’s barrister telling tye court that doctors “have the sole right to make decisions about treatment – even if it goes against a patient’s religious beliefs.”

We went through this in the United States, in the unfortunate Terry Schiavo case. At least in that one, there was division amongst the family, with her lying, cheating husband arguing that Mrs Schiavo had previously expressed the wish to die rather than to live in a condition like the one she suffered, and her parents, who said that Mrs Schiavo would not have made such a statement, and who were willing to continue to care for her. There was so much written about that case, from so many perspectives, it’s impossible to know which family was right, but the law wound up siding with Mr Schiavo, and his comatose wife was euthanized.

In Mr Golubchuk’s case, there was no such division: the family wished him to be kept alive (even before he regained consciousness) and the doctors had decided that it was no longer worthwhile to feed him.

If the doubtlessly well-meaning Dr Hoche is looking down on us from above, he is probably smiling now, because our society has decided that, in many cases, the ability of the helpless to live is conditional upon the decisions of other people, concerning whether the right people want that helpless person to live.

We express it in all sorts of ways. Unborn children are not real “persons” under the law, and therefore have no rights; if the pregnant woman decides that she does not wish to bear or rear that child, she has every legal right to simply dispose of him. Even if the child manages to make it to and through birth, thereby becoming a legal person, supposedly possessing full human rights, we don’t take it particularly seriously if the parents decide, immediuately post partum, that they do not wish for the child to live. Amy Grossberg and Brian Peterson murdered their newborn infant (the one they never wanted) and disposed of his body in a dumpster; Miss Grossberg was sentenced to a whopping 2½ years in prison, while Mr Peterson received a whole 2 years in jail. Then, after the Delaware state legislature modified the law, to insure that no similar couple would receive such a slight sentence, Abigail Caliboso and José Ocampo left their newborn baby girl in a portable toilet on a construction site in Bear, Delaware, where she died of exposure on a night when the temperature dropped to 38º F. Miss Caliboso and Mr Ocampo pleaded guilty in a deal with state prosecutors which would have resulted in five year sentences; Delaware Superior Court Judge Richard S. Gebelein said that the sentences were too harsh, noting that the Philipino couple was being treated more harshly than previous “white defendants” (by which he meant Miss Grossberg and Mr Peterson), but the state legislature had changed the law in the interim specifically because of the light sentences received by Miss Grossberg and Mr Peterson. Miss Caliboso and Mr Ocampo received all sorts of support and sympathy, despite the fact that their actions killed a helpless newborn girl.

It seems pretty clear to me: unless the right people think that someone should continue to live, if that person is helpless to prevent his own death, he has no particular right to life. As I noted previously, even in the United States there are areas with laws which enable medical care providers to take the decision to terminate someone’s life, even against the wishes of the family:

Some hospitals already have “futile care” policies. Nor is it simply individual hospitals: Section 166.046, Subsection (e) of the Texas Advance Directives Act (signed into law by Governor George w Bush) allows a health care facility to discontinue life-sustaining treatment against the wishes of the patient or guardian ten days after giving written notice if the continuation of life-sustaining treatment is considered medically inappropriate by the treating medical team.

Herr Doktor Professor Hoche, you were born a century too soon; your ideas, so vilified after the defeat of the Third Reich, are once again in vogue.

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¹ – “Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living”