Little Charlie’s battle is ours, too
It’s a topic that will not go away, one for which there is no easy answer now that science has found ways to keep hearts beating long after meaningful life has ended.
In the 1993 blockbuster “Jurassic Park,” an island was stocked with cloned dinosaurs that launched terrifying attacks on humans, one of whom despairingly noted: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”
That’s what we need to be asking today with hospitals and nursing homes increasingly populated by patients who no longer have anything resembling a quality of life, only a tortured existence mercilessly prolonged by the wonders of technology.
If you’ve been following the heart-wrenching case of Charlie Gard, the 11-monthold British infant, you probably know his traumatized parents have finally ended their legal battle to stave off death so that he might undergo additional experimental therapies.
Little Charlie has significant brain damage. He is also unable to swallow, cry, see or hear. Yet life support sustains him, as it sustains loved ones every day, including loved ones of this paper’s readers who passionately respond whenever the subject is raised here.
Why is it we treat suffering animals with so much more compassion than we show to those we love? If you’ve ever sat by the bedside of a catastrophically ailing parent, spouse or child, you’ve probably pondered that, too.
“I’m going to give you a semester of theology in three minutes,” Father Pat McLaughlin of St. Agatha’s Church in Milton offered, responding to a previous column on this subject. “I realize our secularized society is not persuaded by religious arguments; we want science, not a JudeoChristian ethic that says ‘Thou shall not kill.’
“So we have what we call the principle of double effect: treatments that kill the pain, which is good, or treatments that kill the patient, which is bad. We don’t have to go to extraordinary measures to maintain life if there’s no life there, but we do have to exert ordinary measures, taking away the pain as we wait for the patient to go quietly to God.”
But whom do we trust to decide “there’s no life there?”
An avaricious heir anxious to claim an inheritance?
History reminds us there’s always been a dark side of human nature that over the years has regarded groups of other humans as expendable.
The best of intentions have always been at the mercy of manipulators.
If only the wisdom of Solomon existed in high places, but that’s not the world we live in, is it?
So we’re left to muddle through a thicket of conflicting beliefs and competing emotions.
For Charlie Gard, the struggle will soon be over, but more struggles are surely on the way, perhaps in your life or in mine.
What will our recommendation be then?