The Difficult Decisions of Life and Death
by Andy Perry

Hasn’t life become easier with the progress of time? Just a decade ago none of us had home-based internet connections. Information is so much easier to access today than it used to be. Thirty years ago none of us had personal computers or microwave ovens, and electric car starters were the dream of science fiction writers. Life has gotten easier in so many ways!

But as the last few weeks have made clear to us all, it has also become much harder due to the same technological advances we count as blessings. On Thursday morning, nearly two weeks after her feeding tube was removed, Terri Schiavo died in a Florida hospice facility. For weeks Terri’s parents, backed by evangelical Christians and Catholics, united a protest, supported by President Bush and the governor of Florida, to have her feeding tube replaced. It wasn’t the first time. Twice before Schiavo’s feeding tube had been removed and twice reinserted. The see-saw motion of Schiavo’s case illustrates how divided our nation—and our world—is over the issue of life and death, specifically the sustaining or removal of artificial life support.

This issue is just one under the larger issue of euthanasia, the ending of human life for reasons of mercy. Euthanasia situations involve a whole host of scenarios across a spectrum. Some are very clear-cut, such as Janet Adkins, who, though otherwise healthy, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and hired Jack Kevorkian in the summer of 1990 to help her lethally self-medicate. As Christians who acknowledge God’s sovereign ownership of life and death (see Isaiah 40-49), Adkin’s suicide was clearly murder and Kevorkian her guilty accomplice. Though the medical world has debated whether or not Terri Schiavo’s medical condition was a ‘persistently vegetative’ or minimally conscious state, her lack of necessity for other life-support technology save artificial nutrition and fluids decidedly points to life not death. We have every reason to be outraged by her husband’s decision to prematurely end her life, for in so doing, he was playing God.

We can predict that such cases will only become more prominent in the future as our culture acquiesces to a worldview which marginalizes the authority of the Creator over human life and replaces it with the autonomy of man and the exaltation of our freedom of choice at all costs. In light of this spirit of our age which devalues human life by excluding God’s sovereignty from the center of society, consider some biblical and related truths which will prove helpful to keep us thinking straight regarding life and death issues:

1. The 6th Commandment (Exodus 20:13) says “You shall not murder” - including oneself.

2. Only God ultimately controls life and death (Ecclesiastes 3:2, Psalm 24:1).

3. Euthanasia may remove an opportunity for God to glorify Himself through healing (James 5:14).

4. According to the Bible, no one has an inherent ‘right to die.’

5. Doctors have taken the Hippocratic Oath which requires them to use medical technology always to help and never to harm a patient.

At the same time, it is well that we recognize that all end of life issues are not so clear cut given artificial life-support technologies available today. For instance, it is possible for a human body’s vital organs to remain functional through artificial means for quite some time, even long after the hope of conscious life is gone. Such technology causes us to ask the question, when do such on-going interventions truly save life and when do they actually disrupt the natural dying process? That is not an easy question to answer but it is a vital one, since many Christian ethicists believe prolonged and excessive, artificial life-support which clearly disrupts the natural dying process is as much playing God as premature euthanasia. Theologians John and Paul Feinberg and Wayne Grudem offer the following to consider in such situations:

1. Doctors require some kind of empirical evidence that a soul has departed the body. Many invoke the criteria set forth by the Harvard Medical School, including
___a) total unreceptivity and unresponsiveness
___b) no movements or spontaneous breathing for at least one hour
___c) no reflexes and fixed, dilated pupils
___d) flat brain wave (EEG) for twenty minutes.
Such must still be true for a patient twenty-four hours after first tested.

2. Personhood should be determined not by subjective quality of life but by objective biological criteria.

3. If a person’s death is imminent and irreversible, then we are morally obliged to administer technologies that will relieve their pain, even if such intervention speeds their death.

4. One should not encourage a terminally ill patient to undergo procedures with no foreseeable benefit.

In short, all decisions regarding end of life issues should ultimately be made in light of the sovereignty of God over life and death. He is the Master of life, therefore we should never seek to end it prematurely. He is also the Master of death, therefore we should never seek to prolong it indefinitely once the dying process is imminent. In all things we must let God be God.

Recently I heard an interview with John Paris, a Catholic priest who teaches at Boston University, who points to his grandmother’s final days with her dying sister as a good example of both upholding human life in honor to God and allowing the dying process take place as God designed. Let’s close with Dr. Paris’ thoughts in his own words:

When her elderly sister was dying and had lost her ability to eat, my grandmother would come in and give her sips of soup. If a doctor suddenly came in and said to her, “We can put a little, flexible tube down your sister’s nose to feed her,” my grandmother would have said, “Glory be to God, have you lost your senses? The poor woman is dying!” And then she would ask, “And what is your tube going to do for that?”.... Now the question is, “Was my grandmother systematically starving her sister to death out of ignorance or out of malice?” The answer is “Neither.” She was understanding that her sister was dying...she was understanding the human condition, she was understanding that life in itself is not an absolute good….She would have said, “God is calling her home. Who are we to impede that from happening?”

Whether in life or death, let us let God be God.