Killing off the dying?

Public Interest, Spring, 1998 by Adam Wolfson

So highly valued is compassion to advocates of assisted suicide that it becomes the defining element in assigning praise and blame, innocence and guilt. It is both a motive to extreme action - the taking of a life - and a rationale for absolution. In Quill's view: "When the assistant is motivated by compassion for an incurably ill patient who clearly and repeatedly requests help, the act can be ethical and moral"; but if an assistant under identical conditions is motivated by some other passion "then the act of assistance becomes immoral, unethical." Quill argues further that not to provide the means of release from such suffering - not to kill the sufferer - can often seem "cruel" to family members. It is not happenstance that the assisted-suicide cases recently taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court were brought by an organization named "Compassion in Dying."

A euthanasia case that recently made its way through the Canadian court system is illustrative of the practice of an ethics of pure compassion. Robert Latimer was tried for the murder of his 12-year-old daughter Tracy who suffered from cerebral palsy. The father admitted that he had killed his daughter, and he did not claim that Tracy had asked to be killed. He wanted simply to end her pain and suffering. He felt compassion for his daughter. So he placed her in the cab of his truck and left the engine running until she died of carbon-monoxide poisoning. Canadian public opinion was generally supportive of Robert Latimer, and the judge in the case gave him but a one year sentence on the grounds that Latimer "was motivated solely by his love and compassion for Tracy and the need, at least in his mind - that she should not suffer any more pain."

Tracy's fate reminded me of a Flannery O'Connor essay about a young girl named Mary Ann who like Tracy suffered from a terrible disease and also died at the age of twelve. Mary Ann's affliction was cancer. "She had been born with a tumor on the side of her face," which was, O'Connor wrote, "plainly grotesque." About Mary Ann's physical suffering, O'Connor said little, though one can be reasonably sure that by today's standards of palliative care (she died in 1960), it was severe. Yet Mary Ann was not shown compassion by poison gas as was Tracy. She lived out her brief span in the care of the Sister Superior of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Free Cancer Home in Atlanta.

Tracy's world was about as far as one can get from Mary Ann's. Christian charity had been silenced by an ethics of total compassion in her case. O'Connor would have labeled it rule by "tenderness," and she knew down which dark roads it leads:

If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.