There’s an odd disconnect many “pro-lifers” seem to exhibit between their ideology and their personal understanding of the difficult decisions they, too, sometimes face. One thinks of the more-than-a-few Republicans who are part of the “fetus-fetish” community but who support embryonic stem cell research because a family member or someone they know has a debilitating disease, or the more-than-infrequent anecdotal reports of anti-choice activists seeking abortions – often at the same clinics they themselves had been picketing! – because their situations were somehow “different”. From Jeanette at the blog “Oh, How I Love Jesus Because He First Loved Me” (yes, really) comes another example, moving in its own way, but strangely indifferent to the idea that others might have similar thoughts.

Regarding Ariel Sharon and his continuing unresponsive state:

I am not a death advocate, nor am I in favor of euthanasia, but the time comes when heroic measures aren’t bringing him back to consciousness and his family has to consider letting him go peacefully. . . .

[Sharon] is between two worlds. He’s is in neither completely, but he is more in the world of death than he is in the world of life.

Drastic measures do not have to be taken to save the life of this great leader. Neither do they have to be taken to take his life. Just let God decide when he’s going to go. In his state if he has an infection he won’t feel it and by not treating it he can be released from the bonds of earth and be completely in one world instead of between them. This is my opinion only.

This is not a model of coherent thought. She seems completely unaware that this is exactly what is done in most cases of end-of-life care that do not end spontaneously. (She also seems unaware that “letting him go” would be categorized as a form of euthanasia by most ethicists – “passive euthanasia” is the term of art.) Like many laypeople, she seems to see a difference between “withdrawing” and “withholding” care. When she says “drastic measures” (?) should not be employed to “take his life”, she apparently means that any supportive care he is getting should not be discontinued, but she is also comfortable with the idea that simply standing by as he dies from a treatable infection is perfectly OK, and morally different from the former. (This question was hotly debated among ethicists, what now seems a long time ago, so perhaps it is not surprising that someone unfamiliar with the issues would not see their way clearly through it, but most people today would see no moral difference between the two cases. The decisive example: if you intend to drown your young nephew in order to take his inheritance, but upon entering the room discover him facedown in the bathtub, already drowning, and merely stand by and do nothing, are you morally innocent? It seems obvious you are not – and if so, “letting die” is not obviously morally different from active killing.) And why exactly is death from the deliberate refusal to intervene in an easily treatable infection an act of God, yet terminating life support while God refuses to intervene is murder?

Never mind. Confusions aside, the writer’s humane impulses are easily visible. There is a time when further treatment seems unproductive, and it is reasonable at that time to choose to end a life rather than continue to torment a failing body. She prefers passive methods to active ones – a common guilt-easing inclination – and she wants to find a way to slough the responsibility off onto “God”, but her evaluation of the case in general, and the reasons for her decision, are clearly rooted in an intuitive sense of the patient’s prognosis and quality of life. And this is just as most ethicists think it should be.

But for some reason she also feels a need to distance herself from other people who hold exactly the same beliefs she does. She favors deliberate non-treatment of treatable, fatal conditions in order to “[let] him go peacefully” – but she’s certainly not in favor of “euthanasia”. She advocates letting Sharon “be released from the bonds of earth” and enter “the world of death”, but she’s certainly not a “death advocate”. She thinks doctors should withhold simple antibiotic treatment under terms that would constitute fatal malpractice in any case not explicitly intended to end in the patient’s death, but she’s certainly not in favor of “drastic measures”. She’s “different“, you see.

She’s obviously convinced that many people who would advocate similar courses for other patients are somehow . . . different . . . from her. They don’t have her moral stance. They don’t have her sincere concern for the patient’s best interests (a patient, let us note with weary familiarity, she has never met or spoken to). They presumably don’t love Jesus as much as her. They “favor euthanasia”. They are “death advocates”. They propose “drastic measures”.

Yet what is actually different between her position and that of the most “drastic” members of the “culture of death”? Presumably she would not favor terminating active life support, and possibly not terminating nutrition and hydration, for hopeless non-terminal cases. But she’s perfectly willing to connive at death by waiting for a convenient infection and then withholding a simple treatment that, in that scenario at least, is even more vital than nutrition and hydration. That’s a fine distinction – one that most ethicists think is illusory, but at any rate not one involving any great moral separation. Note also that her position – to refuse to treat an infection – is one of the decisions the right-wing howler monkeys savaged Michael Schiavo for making in regard to Terry Schiavo’s case, invariably claiming that it was inhumane and a violation of basic standards of care. That looks different, somehow, in Sharon’s case.

This woman is clearly sympathetic to the suffering and hopelessness some cases of unresponsiveness can present. She sees the need for action to end that torment in appropriate cases. She differs from “progressive” ethicists in the distinction she makes between acts and omissions (which is to say she’s where the progressive ethicists were 20 years ago), but she does not adopt a mindless “flog the body till it rots” mentality. Yet she is convinced that others who think like her are some sort of dangerous radicals. She believes her own position is merely common-sense humanity – a belief in which she is joined by most ethicists – but presumes others who hold very similar beliefs are motivated by some kind of “death advocacy” or other evil impulse. She believes her moral insights are “different” somehow from the same insights held by other people – with much more-informed perspectives on these issues – that don’t happen to be prefaced by breathless encomia to Jesus.

If she’d look around, she – and others who share her political and moral presumptions – might realize that the “death advocates” are just people like them, equally concerned for the welfare of others facing hopeless or unbearable situations, and equally convinced of the humanity of easing their suffering by appropriate means. But that would require relinquishing their privileged moral judgment, their difference, and perhaps jettisoning a few paranoid myths.