The Ethics of Living and Dying Today

Extract

Two summers ago, some friends of ours lost their 14-year-old son. He slipped while clambering around on a family picnic at the seaside—so innocuous in the sunshine!—and three days later they were told that he would never recover consciousness. It was explained to them that he could of course be kept ‘alive’ indefinitely if that was their wish ? Had our friends been Catholics, would they have found it any easier to make the decision to turn off the machine? I doubt it.

Yet I feel it should have been. Recent work on bereavement records the regularity with which the bereaved are prey to feelings of guilt over negligences to the dying person or the inevitable feeling where an illness is long-drawn out, that the sooner death comes, the better. What is likely then to be the psychological effect on those bereaved by their own decision, and how badly do they need the moral support and comfort of a caring but clear-headed church in this predicament? Outsiders accuse the autocratic Catholic Church of still issuing rule-of-thumb directives on all moral questions, and since, alone of the Christian churches, she still maintains an absolute stand on the taking of life (as those with experience in the abortion field well know), it would amaze them to learn that in such an agonising decision as this, the Church appears to have so little positive help to offer. Why ? One can of course suggest reasons : positive ones, such as the one of which my father constantly reminded us in our days of youthful revolt, that a Church which claims to speak to all peoples and for all ages must exercise a wise conservatism and not rush into rash statements; and the corollary : that the Church prefers to avoid rigid statements where the situation is uncertain and still in the process of developing—as is clearly the case with topical medical techniques.