JEDDAH, 11 November 2004 — As the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat remains in a coma, controversy is brewing about whether or not he should be denied what many call “a dignified death.”
According to French and Palestinian sources the medical consensus on Arafat is that he is unlikely to return to life in any normal sense of the term. A British consultant, called in by the French Wednesday night, is reported to have advised that the septuagenarian leader be pronounced clinically dead.
On the other hand Arafat could continue, in a more or les vegetative state, for weeks if not months or even years, connected to a life-support machine that performs the functions of those organs of his body that have stopped working.
The Palestinian leaders have managed to handle the political aspect of this complex situation with some dexterity. They have applied the rules stated in the Palestinian Basic Law (constitution), that cover the consequences of the leader’s temporary or permanent incapacity. Politically, Arafat is, for all intents and purposes, personally out of the picture. But for as long as he is kept officially alive, he is certain to have an impact on the power struggle that is already under way within the Palestinian establishment.
But there is also the human dimension of Arafat’s fate. Should he be kept artificially alive at the lowest level of existence; and if yes, for how long?
Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, has made it clear that the leadership in Ramallah is opposed to the idea of disconnecting Arafat from the life-support machine.
“We cannot consider euthanasia for Abu Ammar,” Shaath said in Paris Tuesday night.
The Palestinian leadership’s opposition to euthanasia is certainly sincere. But the fact is that keeping Arafat in a state of living-and-not-living also serves their political purposes. As long as Arafat is not officially dead they have no need of calling elections within 60 days.
The debate over euthanasia has been one of the most heated in the area of medical ethics in the past decade or so. Some countries have already taken legal measures either to allow euthanasia or to lighten the punishment of those who practice it.
The Land of Mercy-Killing
The first country to make euthanasia legal was Holland in 2001. Since then a total of 813 terminally ill patients have been put to death under the new law.
Spokesmen for virtually all major religions condemned the Dutch initiative on the grounds that giving and taking lives was a prerogative of the Divine, and not a matter of individual choice. Religious organizations and leaders from one end of the earth to the other issued a string of condemnations. Some of the language used in these missives recalls the “bell, candle and book” vocabulary of the inquisition. Fortunately, however, no Dutch legislator risks being burned at the stake.
Since then Switzerland has also passed laws to allow for euthanasia, albeit with more stringent rules than the Dutch have in place. The French criminal code has also been amended to protect doctors against prosecution in special cases involving the termination of a patient’s life.
In 2003, France was held spellbound by a letter sent by a terminally ill young man to President Jacques Chirac asking that the doctors be allowed to pull the plug and let him die in peace.
Supporters of euthanasia argue that keeping terminally ill patients, who are often subject to excruciating pain, alive, is both inhuman and economically wasteful. Resources that are “wasted” on keeping such patients alive would be better employed in providing more effective treatment and care for others with curable illnesses. A coldly calculated estimate of the financial savings that euthanasia generates for the Dutch treasury comes to a staggering figure of $1.2 billion a year.
The so-called “silent majority”, for its part appears resigned to the idea that the “average man” has little influence on the course of scientific, development and that euthanasia is bound to become the general practice of mankind in a generation or so.
It is clear that the debate on euthanasia, as on a wide range of other issues related to various aspects of modern human existence, cannot be confined to either the religious or the economic arena. The issuing of anathemas and interdicts in the name of religion will not convince, or frighten, those who do not believe, or who believe differently. Nor would it influence governments that attach more importance to losing an election in this world to being roasted for their sins in the next.
The Dutch law, which may, in time spread to all the 25 European Union countries, can and must be opposed on ethical and practical grounds, and in terms that cut across religious divides. Euthanasia is the latest manifestation of efforts to submit key aspects of life to the cold logic of scientific analysis in the hope of imposing strictly rational control on human existence. The practice is presented in the form of “the right to die”, a means of disguising euthanasia as one of the human rights now recognized by virtually all civilizations.
An Essay
What is interesting is that “the right to die” is not complemented by a corresponding “right to be born”. In almost all cases those who support “the right to die” also support the right to kill the unborn baby in the name of abortion.
They are also vague on the subject of children born with incurable diseases and thus subjected to a life of suffering. The latter point merits emphasis because the number of incurable diseases, or conditions, is far larger than one may imagine. Diabetes is incurable, although it can be treated. Short-sightedness is also incurable, although it can be corrected by the use of spectacles. If we were to “cull” all human beings who suffer from various ailments very few people would be left on this earth.
In any case, the absolutely healthy and perfect human being is a myth that would appeal to Nazis and other fanatics of biological perfection.
Taking their position to its absurd, but logically consistent, conclusion we should organize a new global system of producing only “perfect” human beings who will not fall ill or suffer.
Correcting DNA Defects
Many geneticists are already working in that direction. Research on ways of “correcting” human DNA defects is clearly aimed at such a goal. New computer software to help individuals and couples achieve “perfect” biological matches also fall into the same category.
The logic of euthanasia would make sense if it were to be applied to the source of life as well. It is senseless to allow people to be born when we know they will be, at some stage in their lives, afflicted by incurable disease that would cause them great suffering.
But the question is; who decides all that? The answer is: Scientists and doctors who are answerable to no one. And that is a recipe for the worst kind of dictatorship that mankind has ever experienced.
Those who support euthanasia say they wish to save their patients from suffering. The question is: What kind and what degree of suffering should be subjected to this rule?
There are people who may wish to die when afflicted by a bad toothache or a migraine. Others are stoical enough to support far greater pain. The Dutch law requires that the decision to die first be taken by the patient himself. But how can someone supposed to be subjected to excruciating pain be in a condition to make a life-and-death decision? The Dutch legal system does not admit a change of testament by a patient in his or her dying days. And yet it allows the same patient to decide a far more complex issue of death on demand.
The phrase “incurable diseases” is equally subject to caution. A generation ago tuberculosis and heart ailments were classified as incurable. Had the Dutch law been in existence at the time the road would have been open for the extermination of millions of people who are alive and well today.
Let us also look at the term “dying patients”. The Dutch law insists that euthanasia should be available only to those who are dying or are kept alive by life support machines. But aren’t we all dying in a sense? Is it not true that we start dying the moment we are born? How can a concept that is so vague and open to misunderstanding provide the basis for life-and-death decisions?
The economic argument advanced in favor of euthanasia is even more scandalous. If we were to apply the principle of cost-effectiveness to every human existence we would quickly realize the folly of such procedures. There are hundreds of millions of people in the poor countries who contribute nothing or every little to the global economy. And there are tens of millions of old-age pensioners in the richest nations who represent a burden for the public treasury. To decide who lives and who dies on the basis of financial calculations is one example of reason gone mad.
Aristotle, the father of logic, was aware of the dangers of taking rationality into the uncharted territories of human existence. He had also warned that any system that exaggerates its fundamental principle is doomed to destruction. In this particular case, too much rationality kills reason.
There are areas of life, some would say the most important ones, that cannot and must not be subjected to cold scientific logic. These include love, friendship, taste, talent, and, of course, joy and pain. Why do we fall in love with those two particular black eyes and not others in the world? Why do we feel the grace of friendship with this or that particular individual out of billions of human beings? Why do we like the voice of this singer and not the other and the poetry of this poet and not another? How is it that we can paint reasonably well but sing worse than a frog?
The essential areas of human existence must be allowed to retain the mystery that they have always enjoyed in the ethical chiaroscuro of human condition.
We should not decree love, friendship and talent. Nor should we try to decree death. Euthanasia, a Greek word, means “mercy killing” and was initially coined to describe the administration of the coup de grace to badly wounded horses. Human beings, however, cannot be treated the same way as horses. Nor can a doctor of medicine act like a stable boy.
Copyright Arab News 2004
