X-Message-Number: 17887
From: 
Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 13:17:59 EST
Subject: Re: CryoNet #17874 - #17884

While I share Kevin Spoering's low opinion and suspicion of Ashcroft 
generally,  I think cryonicists should view the Oregon decision in a somewhat 
different light. I personally oppose all "right to die" legislation and 
agitation such as by Kevorkian etc on the grounds that it sanctions death as 
the inevitable fate of all and is an opening wedge toward doctor and 
relative-directed death when the patient is incapacitated, very much a mixed 
motive situation.  I recall that when my mother, at the advanced age of 88, 
became strangely and rather suddenly disoriented while in the hospital, the 
primary orientation of medical personnel in attendance was to "let her go; 
her time has come." My inquiries to her attending physician were met with 
what seemed to me a rather chilly response and a concern on his part that he 
needed her bed for other patients, so if she lasted, we would somehow have to 
figure out a way of managing her care elsewhare.  She obligingly faded away 
in a few days without much awareness of what was going on.  The doctor, I 
suspect off-handedly, assigned "cancer" as the cause of death, on what 
evidence we were never told; I suspect the impicit diagnosis was "old age." 
Her surviving children and friends including myself were probably complicit 
in this process through silence and deference to the medical establishment. 
Her demise was perhaps aided [and hastened?] by her own "living will."  I 
think cryonicists have to be suspicious of all such arrangements and the 
mixed motives of caregivers in hospital and hospice situations.  All this 
will change, of course, when cryonics becomes an acceptable, then accepted, 
then popular option for the critically ill, but those days still seem a long 
way off.  Meanwhile we should be carefull in choosing sides in battles like 
this. 
 Implicit in the belief in the extension of human life is or should be a 
strong value in the preciousness of all human lives and their extension.  For 
the same reason, even as a life-long liberal and supporter of equality 
between the sexes , I am very uneasy about legalized abortion.  I can live 
with the Roe-v-Wade formula and we will never resolve the conundrum of when 
life actually begins, but I cannot abide the notion that the destruction of a 
viable fetus is the right of anyone, including the carryiing mother.
Ron Havelock, Shady Side Maryland, now happily signed-up CI member.

Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17887