Boxer rebellion

National Review, August 17, 1992

YES, those were boxer shorts California delegates were waving at TV cameras in Madison Square Garden. A promo for Frederick's of Hollywood? No, a plug for Barbara Boxer, the Democrat's candidate to replace Alan Cranston in the U.S. Senate. Mrs. Boxer will face the conservative Bruce Herschensohn in the fall. Her slogan: "Put a fighter in the Senate."

Quite catchy--until you check out what she would be fighting for. In some ways Representative Boxer makes Alan Cranston, the Senate's aging Lion of the Left, look like a raging centrist. She has labored mightily to try to translate into national policy the eccentric enthusiasms of the liberal Left.

Let's look at what she believes and supports: a wish list of $400 billion in new federal spending; undiminished fervor for comparable worth; unfailing support for the Congressional Black Caucus's budget ideas, even the 1985 plan for raising taxes $171 billion and slashing defense $286 billion (she now wants defense cut 50 per cent).

The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gushes, giving her a career score of 91. Meanwhile, she has voted 88 per cent of the time with Vermont's Representative Bernard Sanders, Congress's only avowed Socialist. She favors a National Endowment for the Homeless; opposed cutting franked mailing costs from $80 million to $59 million; and voted against even the tepid amendment by liberal Representative Pat Williams (D., Mont.) that commends "general standards of decency" to the National Endowment for the Arts.

Danny Ortega had few more reliable buddies in Congress. Boxer even opposed humanitarian aid to the Contras when they were struggling to survive on the eve of Nicaragua's 1990 elections. And during last year's Persian Gulf debate, Boxer recited from a Bette Midler ditty: "From a distance, you look like my friend, even though we are at war. From a distance, I just can't comprehend what all this fighting is for." When Representative Boxer had finished, a female congressional aide loudly responded, "Isn't that disgusting? You just want to smack her." And don't forget the 143 kited checks.

Unlike Clinton and Gore who are trying to hide their liberal past, Mrs. Boxer holds pronounced views that she has never sought to camouflage. Will Californians elect as senator a time traveler from the Summer of Love?

There's no required inquiry into the patient's mental state. And no requirement that patients in severe pain be told of alternative methods of relieving their trauma. The fact is, "no patient should have to endure pain in this day and age, with the pain-fighting medications and therapies now available," says Dr. David Cundiff, director of Cancer Pain Services at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center. He admits many physicians aren't conversant in advanced techniques, but the drive to educate more of them will only be set back if the countor-option of euthanasia is legitimized.

Proposition 161's many loopholes give urgency to the old slippery-slope warnings, the forecasts of callousness ascendant and life devalued. Doctors opposing Washington state's measure argued that it "could open the door for the coercion of elderly or poor patients to accept active euthanasia as a way of relieving family financial pressures."

In May, Derek Humphry told a seminar that the California initiative is only a first step. The next stop, he believes, should be to allow incompetent patients to request "aid in dying" in advance. He has written that aid in dying for the handicapped and "other exceptional cases" will be become more accessible "when we have statutes on the books permitting lawful physician aid in dying for the terminally ill."

The opposition will also try to get out the story about the Netherlands, where euthanasia is allowed in a de facto way, and where "there are now many well-documented cases of... cryptic and 'uninvited' killing by doctors," as medical ethicist Leon Kass of the University of Chicago reports.

Columnist Nat Hentoff notes that our new openness to euthanasia would have appalled anthropologist Margaret Mead. She used to remind people that, up until the fifth century B.C., when a doctor entered the room, a patient didn't know whether he'd be cared for or killed. "Throughout the primitive world," Mead said, "the doctor and the sorcerer tended to be the same person. He who had the power to cure would necessarily be able to kill."

The revolution came with Hippocrates. "For the first time in our tradition," Mead pointed out, "there was a complete separation between killing and curing. But society always is attempting to make the physician into a killer--to kill the defective child at birth, to leave the sleeping pills beside the bed of the cancer patient... it is the duty of society to protect the physician from such requests."

The choice is now before the nation's largest state: to cling to the venerable vision of medicine as a healing, comforting art--or to revert to a primitive ethic that enlists physicians in the cause of death. If voters choose the latter, the chilling repercussions won't stop at the state line.