End-of-life issues bring focus to bioethics challenges instead of dead, “they confuse family members, the media, judges and the public. Calling someone brain dead makes it seem they are almost dead, sort of dead, kind of dead, but not really dead — which they are.” Use of neurological criteria to determine death is legitimate according to the National Catholic Bioethics Center, an organization with an impressive board that includes the archbishops of Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Louisville, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, as well as a number of other medical and policy experts. Pope John Paul II approved this approach in an address given to the 18th International Conference of Organ Transplant Specialists in August 2000. In a recent interview, Caplan acknowledged that some people would like to roll back the definition of brain death, or at least to make it negotiable — a concept he describes as completely wrong. “If we rely on families, we would have ICUs filled with bodies,” he said. “We couldn’t afford it and it’s not the right use of resources.” Making sound moral decisions in the face of life and death is especially difficult given emotional pressures that accompany situations when family members or loved ones endure great suffering. For Catholics and other Christians alike, the question “How can a merciful God allow us to experience such suffering?” is not uncommon. “Death is not the end of our life; it is merely a transition to a life for which we were born in the first place — the eternal life of bliss with our loving
Church teaches that individuals can pursue
according to the National Catholic Bioethics
such treatment when there is a reasonable
Center.
hope of benefit. They are also free to refuse
Father Currie acknowledges that spiritual
When his mother had a stroke, Father Currie recalls, the doctors asked about inserting a feeding tube. If the answer was no, he was
treatment that has a questionable benefit or
leaders often find themselves in difficult
told, then she would starve to death or find
when its burdens are larger than its benefits.
situations when advising patients on such
it difficult to swallow. “That was hardly a
issues. “We don’t know sometimes what will
choice,” he says. The best approach is to
decline forms of treatment that would only
happen, even if the patient is in a vegetative
have a written advance directive, Father Currie
result in a burdensome prolongation of
state for a long period of time,” he says.
suggests.
life. There is often presumption in favor of
“Maybe he won’t come back. Maybe it’s not
continuing to provide food and water to the
worthwhile to prolong the agony.” Moreover,
then God and the patient’s faith should be
patient, but there is a stage in the dying
he says that hospitals today more readily offer
brought into the decision. “At times that
process when even these may no longer be
life support because they are trying to save
means having the patience to let the system
obligatory because they provide no benefit
lives and often err on the side of caution.
break down and allow natural death to occur.”
When death is imminent, patients may
If life is seen as a gift from God, he adds,
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