Word: quinlans
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...regard to the Quinlan case [Nov. 3]: if the courts were to find in favor of the parents, a Pandora's box would be opened. If the courts were to judge that an act of omission by a physician in not prolonging life is homicide, then every patient who dies could become the basis of legal action against the physician. Such a decision would virtually paralyze the practice of medicine...
...eleven days, Superior Court Judge Robert Muir Jr. of Morris County, N.J., pondered the painful, unprecedented legal problem: Did the anguished parents of 21-year-old Karen Anne Quinlan have the right to switch off the respirator that had kept her alive since she fell into a deep coma in April? Last week Muir announced his decision. In a 44-page ruling, he noted sadly that he had to discount "the compassion, empathy, sympathy" he felt toward the Quinlan family. Both "judicial conscience and morality," he went on, told him that Karen's fate was being handled properly...
Last week a New Jersey judge failed to make that standard a legal one when he ruled that the parents of Karen Ann Quinlan could not allow her to expire. Quinlan is comatose and cannot speak or think. She also cannot live without the mechanical support of an artificial respirator; by the Harvard criteria she is dead...
...certainly agree that keeping Karen Quinlan alive is cruel and unusual punishment. What I can't understand is how a person can be dead in one state and alive in another...
Theologian Marty should rethink his belief that extraordinary treatment be stopped on Karen Quinlan because "in any other age she would be dead anyhow." Termination of treatment hinges not on whether she could have survived in any other age but whether Karen's state is human existence...