“Death with Dignity”

Opinion Journal has an article on a woman whose dad was “dying” and the doctors kept asking her to let him go cheerfully.

“Dr. Death” was just one of several. A new resident appeared the next day, this one a bit more diplomatic but again urging us to allow my father to “die with dignity.” And the next day came yet another, who opened with the words, “We’re getting mixed messages from your family,” before I shut him up. I’ve written extensively about practice of bioethics–which, for the most part, I do not find especially ethical–but never did I dream that our moral compass had gone this far askew. My father, 85, was heading ineluctably toward death. Though unconscious, his brain, as far as anyone could tell, had not been touched by either the cancer or the blood clot. He was not in a “persistent vegetative state” (itself a phrase subject to broad interpretation), that magic point at which family members are required to pull the plug–or risk the accusation that they are right-wing Christians.

She gets in several zingers on Christians, but her post is a good and interesting one.