There are (perhaps surprisingly) many similarities between our approach to death and our approach to fertility. My piece yesterday was a snapshot into that and your piece today is a perfect continuation. The common thread in both is *humanity* something we are going to need to be more and more intentional about preserving, honoring, and celebrating. Thanks for your words!
Caitlin, yes. I wrote a whole essay a while back making this very connection (thinking through Neil Postman's chapter on medicine in his book Technopoly).
The levels of control now assumed to be an absolute imperative seem to mirror each other (in fertility: avoidance at all costs/conception at any cost, in death: avoidance of death at all costs/embracing death prematurely). I need to do some edits and send it off into the world.
Your hypotheses 2 & 4 resonate. I’m the pastor of an Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia, and I made friends recently with a “death doula” working locally. There’s a great deal that she and I disagree on in matters of both death and life, but her project is a striking, and, I think, an honourable, one: to increase “death literacy.” I think that’s a great phrase. Perhaps it gets a little close to death as problem, rather than mystery, but I think my friend’s target is the professionalisation and seclusion of death, which she wants to bring back into the open.
Maybe I'm not fully understanding you in hypothesis number 1. Wouldn't the alternative to "extending life-sustaining hydration and nutrition" be for the patient to die of starvation or dehydration? I would think that in that alternative, when the choice is either, "You can waste away over a week dying of starvation, or we can end it quickly and easily with this injection today," many people would find the injection preferable (rightly or not).
Removing/opposing those efforts to extend life seem to me much more likely to fortify support for MAiD in other sorts of scenarios too. A dying man on a ventilator for example -- the ventilator may be extending his life, but if you remove it he dies of suffocation -- a horrific death. Given the choice between a deadly, but painless, injection and having a ventilator removed, I don't know if I would have the courage to choose the second....
Your questions are valid, and touch on the tension created by the wonders of modern medicine. Having gone through the process of my first wife's decline from a serious lung condition (a decade and a half ago), having witnessed her peaceful death while in hospice, I can offer a few possible responses to your very valid concerns. The first being that it's only in the last half century that this kind of dilemma exists...natural death, what people experienced in the decades, centuries before modern medicine, does include dying from lack of nutrition or lack of sufficient oxygen. Modern medicine includes methods to alleviate the suffering (e.g., air hunger) that can accompany those. But even without those medications (morphine to control or eliminate air hunger, for example), such deaths normally occur as a patient simply falls asleep and doesn't wake up. I would recommend the book "Between Life and Death: A Gospel-Centered Guide to End-of-Life Medical Care," by Kathryn Butler, a Christian ICU doctor. From extensive experience in dealing with patients and modern medicine, she writes well about the very positive benefits of the various life-support technologies--including the two you ask about; she also writes thoughtfully about their limitations--they're not curative, and should be used where they give the person time to heal from, say, an infection or disease, but beyond two to three weeks, all they're doing is prolonging, delaying, the inevitable death; at that point, wisdom comes in accepting natural death, with all that can be done to allay the discomfort or suffering you refer to, recognizing the sovereignty of God in it all.
There are (perhaps surprisingly) many similarities between our approach to death and our approach to fertility. My piece yesterday was a snapshot into that and your piece today is a perfect continuation. The common thread in both is *humanity* something we are going to need to be more and more intentional about preserving, honoring, and celebrating. Thanks for your words!
Caitlin, yes. I wrote a whole essay a while back making this very connection (thinking through Neil Postman's chapter on medicine in his book Technopoly).
The levels of control now assumed to be an absolute imperative seem to mirror each other (in fertility: avoidance at all costs/conception at any cost, in death: avoidance of death at all costs/embracing death prematurely). I need to do some edits and send it off into the world.
You know I'd love to read it!
Your hypotheses 2 & 4 resonate. I’m the pastor of an Anglican Church in Sydney, Australia, and I made friends recently with a “death doula” working locally. There’s a great deal that she and I disagree on in matters of both death and life, but her project is a striking, and, I think, an honourable, one: to increase “death literacy.” I think that’s a great phrase. Perhaps it gets a little close to death as problem, rather than mystery, but I think my friend’s target is the professionalisation and seclusion of death, which she wants to bring back into the open.
The idea of 'death doulas' will never not be weird to me.
100% agreed.
Maybe I'm not fully understanding you in hypothesis number 1. Wouldn't the alternative to "extending life-sustaining hydration and nutrition" be for the patient to die of starvation or dehydration? I would think that in that alternative, when the choice is either, "You can waste away over a week dying of starvation, or we can end it quickly and easily with this injection today," many people would find the injection preferable (rightly or not).
Removing/opposing those efforts to extend life seem to me much more likely to fortify support for MAiD in other sorts of scenarios too. A dying man on a ventilator for example -- the ventilator may be extending his life, but if you remove it he dies of suffocation -- a horrific death. Given the choice between a deadly, but painless, injection and having a ventilator removed, I don't know if I would have the courage to choose the second....
Your questions are valid, and touch on the tension created by the wonders of modern medicine. Having gone through the process of my first wife's decline from a serious lung condition (a decade and a half ago), having witnessed her peaceful death while in hospice, I can offer a few possible responses to your very valid concerns. The first being that it's only in the last half century that this kind of dilemma exists...natural death, what people experienced in the decades, centuries before modern medicine, does include dying from lack of nutrition or lack of sufficient oxygen. Modern medicine includes methods to alleviate the suffering (e.g., air hunger) that can accompany those. But even without those medications (morphine to control or eliminate air hunger, for example), such deaths normally occur as a patient simply falls asleep and doesn't wake up. I would recommend the book "Between Life and Death: A Gospel-Centered Guide to End-of-Life Medical Care," by Kathryn Butler, a Christian ICU doctor. From extensive experience in dealing with patients and modern medicine, she writes well about the very positive benefits of the various life-support technologies--including the two you ask about; she also writes thoughtfully about their limitations--they're not curative, and should be used where they give the person time to heal from, say, an infection or disease, but beyond two to three weeks, all they're doing is prolonging, delaying, the inevitable death; at that point, wisdom comes in accepting natural death, with all that can be done to allay the discomfort or suffering you refer to, recognizing the sovereignty of God in it all.
This is a late response, but I think John's response here sums up much of what I might have said!