Word: cruzans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Cases that tell people how to live their private lives arouse passionate controversy and are correspondingly difficult to settle, as the court found after its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. There are 10,000 other patients like Cruzan in the U.S., and their families are waiting and watching. "I'm riding on the Cruzans' coattails," says St. Louis marketing consultant Pete Busalacchi, whose daughter Christine lies in the same Missouri rehabilitation center as Cruzan. "Maybe it would have been best if she had died that night," he says, referring to Christine's 1987 auto accident. "This...
...many physicians, the actions they take often depend more on circumstance than on moral certainty. How far is the patient from death? How great is the pain? How clear the will? Does the patient just want to be left alone, or is he asking to be killed? The Cruzan case has raised the basic medical issue of whether doctors must continue to treat patients they cannot cure. In its amicus brief to the Supreme Court, the American Academy of Neurology argues that the doctor's duty is to continue treating unconscious patients as long as there is some chance...
...when doctors cannot consult the patient directly, the issue becomes much harder. Karen Ann Quinlan's was the most celebrated right-to-die case before Cruzan's, and one that seems almost straightforward by comparison. In 1975, after she had been comatose for seven months, Quinlan's father went to the New Jersey Supreme Court to have her respirator turned off. The court agreed, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to consider the case further. After the ruling, Quinlan lived nine more years breathing on her own. But Nancy Cruzan is not on a life-support system. Her parents...
...life proponents, including some physicians, argue that food and water, even supplied artificially, are not "medical treatment." They are the very least that human beings owe one another -- and that doctors owe their patients. To keep a heart beating after a brain is dead makes no sense. But Nancy Cruzan is not brain dead; like a baby, she survives...
...throughout the American legal tradition, right alongside the protection of individual liberty. When the two rights are at odds, the debates grow fierce. There are specific circumstances in which a society permits the intentional taking of life: in war, in self-defense, as punishment for a heinous crime. The Cruzan case raises the question of whether personal choice and great suffering, by either patients or their families, should join that set of circumstances...