"Thou shalt not kill, but.needst not strive/Officiously to keep alive." Arthur Hugh Clough, one of the great Victorian agnostics.
I am wary of absolutism in morals. I prefer to say that there is a presumption in favour of something (telling the truth, being kind) or against it (theft, jealousy) rather than: you must always or you must never. In general one doesn't hold with killing; anyone who takes a life has a case to answer, in the way that the preserver of life does not. Absolute pacifists excepted, we allow for the exception of killing in war, which is fine. Brave. Heroic. Yeah, right. Don't get me started: I'm not a pacifist, I just think war is a totally disgusting activity.
Where were we? Oh yes, absolute moral imperatives. Clough is right: there is none which requires us to preserve life at all costs. Compassion may require us to end the life of another, as humanely as we can. Religious conservatives dissent, of course.
At the Hillsborough disaster on 15 April 1989, 95 football fans were killed, either on the day or not long afterward. A 96th fan, Tony Bland, survived.... except he didn't. He entered a "persistent vegatative state" from within which no-one could communicate with him or he with anyone else. All his biological functions had to be attended to by medical staff, apart from breathing, which he could still do without machine support. Which meant he had to be kept alive.
If you can call it living. But there was nothing to distinguish between this "living" and the mere existence of the bed in the ward he on lay for four years. He wouldn't be waking up. He might as well have died at Hillsborough, as his parents would have preferred. Common sense suggested that Tony should be put to sleep for good, but under English law the administering of a lethal injection would have counted as murder. Eventually the law was made to see sense, and gave permission for Tony's nutrition to be withdrawn, so that he would in effect starve to death.
The case made legal history and is worth looking up. What you may not discover is the reaction of the "Sanctity of Life" brigade, who had kept pretty quiet while the legal battle was raging. That's quiet as in offering no pastoral support to Tony's parents and his consultant, all of whom as it happened were Christians and could share their agonising as brothers and sister in the Lord, so to speak, as well as within the formal relationship of doctor and carers. Mr & Mrs Bland, we learned, felt that God's will was for Tony's vegetative state to be ended. They'd prayed this through, they felt at peace with that conclusion. But as soon as the decision to withdraw treatment from Tony was announced, then the right-to-lifers crawled out of the woodwork, standing in sanctimonious protest with their placards on the entrance drive to Airedale Hospital near Keighley, where Tony was (it was also my local hospital at the time, which is how I know this detail.)
The moralisers' action served only to distress the Blands, challenge the integrity of a highly regarded consultant while failing to serve Tony's interests. It trumpeted their own self-righteousness, insensitivity and ignorance.
The rest of us were provoked by the Tony Bland case into reflecting both on what this thing called "life" is that is supposed to have sanctity, and on the difficulty of framing laws that may allow us to hasten death when to preserve life benefits no-one. Only the most blinkered of ideologues would argue that withdrawing Tony Bland's treatment undermined some vital principle. Saying that, however, raises more questions than can easily be answered: such as, how persistent does a vegetative state have to be before it justifies the termination of life? And, by extension, where there is life, even conscious life but precious little by way of quality and no real prospect of improvement, would that make it OK to reach for the lethal hypodermic?
For Andrew Devine's parents the questions present themselves in the most acute and tragic form; for Andrew was also critically injured at Hillsborough. Like Tony Bland, he existed for years in a deep coma and might have been allowed to die on the same grounds. Unlike the Blands, however, Hilary and Stanley Devine held out, hoping for a miracle. The twist is that Andrew's vegetative state did not persist: he came round. Sort of. In 1997 he opened his eyes and recovery seemed to be on the cards. In 2009, twenty years after the disaster, the Daily Mirror carried this piece, in which the Devines come across not only as immensely stoical, appreciative of people's kindness, still full of "why's" about the dreadful events of 1989, but also stubborn going on denialist. The photograph shows them tough, defiant. They speak of Andrew's ability to understand what's going on, for which there is no evidence: only that he has some minimal consciousness, which has not significantly improved in 12 years. The Devines seem to be great copers, but at some cost to their sense of proportion.
As I check this post for mistakes, "File on 4" is devoting a programme to the plight of persistent vegetative state victims, of whom there are 5000 in this country alone, and their distraught carers. Gulp. There but for the grace of God... Do the Blands ever look at the Devines and think: we were fortunate in that Tony never came round before the decision to end his "life" was taken. That wasn't murder: Andrew Devine is comatose rather than in a coma, so if you ended his life, murder is exactly what it would be. Which seems a harsh, legalistic judgement, but what else can you say? He's not a candidate for assisted dying, because he's not alive enough to express a preference for life over death. That you have no quality of life does not entitle anyone else to put you out of your misery; if it were otherwise, the dementia homes would go out of business.
Further reflection needed, possibly in the light of Terry Pratchett's programme on the subject.
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