Doctor’s Can’t Pull the Plug

Daily Observer

November 3, 1975

I haven’t followed the intimate details of the Quinlan case, which concerns an action by the parents of a stricken girl to force the doctors “to pull the plug” and allow the remaining natural processes of her comatose body to slowly come to a standstill.

I can, however, conjure up a situation in which a family called Zed has a daughter in a coma, with irreversible brain damage, being cared for at a local hospital.

The general consensus is that the girl will never be able to regain consciousness, or to lead a normal life.

Yet through the miracle of modern medicine, life-support systems such as intravenous solutions, catheters, and respirators manage to keep her breathing and to maintain blood pressure through a heart beating at a normal rate.

The costs of this effort are astronomical. The parents cannot bear the burden of this endless suffering. Failing in their efforts to have the doctors cease and desist, they bring the matter to court.

They ask a judge and perhaps a jury to decide the merits of a case. They want the child to die a dignified death. They want to halt the charade.

It all sounds so reasonable. Why should all that money and effort be expended to maintain the vegetative life of this poor girl? The only problem is that by bringing the matter to court they are initiating a process that will institutionalize death.

From this point on, the possibility exists that this country will have death by committee. The judge has been placed in an impossible position. For at the same time the nation will deprive him of the power to impose death sentences on criminals, he is now expected to pronounce a death sentence on a sick girl whose only crime was to become ill, and whose illness is of such a nature that it might possibly be squeezed into the ever changing category of what constitutes death.

Death has been a private matter except in war, since they stopped throwing Christians to the lions and since public executions were outlawed.

One must naturally feel sorry for the Zeds. Their daughter is sick, they flounder in a sea of debt, and they appeal for some sort of surcease.

But what they are actually doing is passing the buck. If they want the child to be totally dead, they can rent the lifesaving equipment, have the child transferred to their own home, and pull the plug themselves.

It is not quite fair to ask the doctors, then judge and jury, and finally the nation, to countenance that which to many might constitute murder.

The decision to allow the stricken patient to die is not unrealistic. The only thing that is unrealistic is the attempt to spread the guilt.

Death is very serious, personal and private. It should be kept that way.

There are many instances in which family and physician agree that no purpose can be served by life-saving measures. But don’t ask your doctor to do what you, in good conscience, could not do yourself.