If I may, I’d like to interject here with two real live experiences in my own family. Many years ago I was married and became the father of three children. One day my wife, father and three children were in an auto accident. My wife and father were killed. My seven-year-old son was on life support. He was determined to be brain dead by three independent neurosurgeons. I was told to take him to hospice, because there was nothing that could be done for him. Instead, I decided to turn off the ventilator and the adrenalin IV that kept his heart beating. He died seven minutes later.
This weekend I went to visit my sister who is very ill. She too has been sent to hospice. Unfortunately, her husband has authorized the removal of water, medication, and the feeding tube. None of these pose a threat to her life. It was simply an agreement between him and the doctors that these measures are extraordinary. I challenged the decision. Of course the law is not on my side, because in the state where she lives the term they use is “vegetative state”. In the mind of the State Legislature, those who in a vegetative state need not be given water, food or medication to prevent infections that will kill them. In other words, the law allows the use of passive euthanasia, allowing the person to die by withholding what is necessary to live.
What is the point here? I have faced to situations in my life that are similar, but very different. In my son’s case, he was brain dead. There was no hope of recovery. Removing the ventilator and the adrenaline was not an attempt to terminate his life or accelerate his death. By allowing him to receive water, food and antibiotics I cooperated with the Divine plan. It is God’s plan that all people should live until he calls them home, not until we decide to dismiss them. God gives us specific natural means to keep us alive: nutrition, hydration and antibodies. A ventilator does not feed, hydrate or protect from infection. It is a pump used to assist the lungs of the person who is otherwise alive. When the person is brain dead, he is not alive. There is a major difference between being brain dead and killing the brain.
In my sister’s case, her brain is very much alive. She breathes on her own. She moves, albeit with great effort. Like the child in the womb, she is dependent on others to feed her, give her water, and protect her from disease. The removal of food, water and medication is a deliberate attempt to accelerate the death of a person who is fully alive, but is dependent on the assistance of others in order to remain alive.
The removal of a child from his mother’s womb is the same as euthanasia. This person is alive, albeit dependent on the mother to remain alive. But he is no more a part of his mother than the terminally ill is a part of his/her spouse. Defenseless is not the same as dead and certainly not the same as a possession. We do not own those who are dependent on us to live, whether they are in the womb or outside the womb. In the case of my son who was brain dead, he was not dependent on me to live, because nothing that I could provide would restore life to his brain.
Herein lays the crux of the matter concerning choice over life and death. If I have the resources to keep someone alive and that person depends on those resources, then I have the moral duty to provide them. The child in the mother’s womb depends on the mother to stay alive until God takes his life. Therefore, the mother has the moral duty to provide what she has to offer. Sometimes, what the mother has to offer is not enough. But the moral law is not about whether the mother has enough to offer, but about whether the mother has anything to offer. Whatever she has to offer, she must offer, just as we must offer food, water and medication to the dying, because it is within our power to offer it.
The choice is one of the highest good. The highest good is to provide what the other person needs to live. To take away, whether it’s before birth or after, is contrary to the highest good. The physical shape of the person has nothing do to with the moral good. Whether the person is still at the early stages of development and looks like a blob or the person is curled in a fetal position in a bed, we have a moral obligation to provide whatever is within our means to preserve that life. That person has a moral right to depend on us. Herein the biblical injunction, “I am my brother’s keeper.”
Fraternally,
Br. JR, OSF
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