06/17/2004: "Euthanasia=compassion? Not quite"

Wesley Smith on NRO contrasts the way Ronald Reagan and his family dealt with his Alzheimer's, and the way a Dutch doctor deals out death to his patients:

Betsy Streisand's "Memories of a Friend in the Park," a first-person observation piece published in the June 21, 2004 U.S. News and World Report, was especially touching in this regard. Streisand recounts how, as Reagan's Alzheimer's forced him out of the public limelight in the late 1990s, he frequented a park in Beverly Hills. Reagan, accompanied by his nurse, liked to sit on a park bench and watch children at play. She recalled:

"Reagan didn't speak much to adults. It was our children he was interested in. Time and again these sticky little specimens encrusted with juice and sand would come up next to him as they made their way to the bags of snacks on the bench. And he would beckon them closer...And although he gradually stopped speaking to us–and our children–we never stopped speaking to him or having the kids play close by where he could watch."

As Reagan's cognitive and verbal abilities collapsed, his human desire to love and be loved remained undiminished. Reagan's son Michael spoke emotionally to this when he described his dad's joy at hugging and being hugged. "As the years went by and he could no longer recognize me," Michael said in a tribute to his father, "I began a process of hugging him whenever I would see him." Most poignantly, the son recalled once forgetting to hug his father goodbye. As he was about to get into his car, Michael's wife told him to turn around. There in the doorway was Ronald Reagan, arms outstretched, waiting for his hug. Tears in his eyes, Michael rushed back to his father and the two embraced.

Even at the very end, love triumphed over disease. Reagan loved his Nancy deeply and intensely, and as he was breathing his last breaths, somehow, some way, he dug deep within himself and found some final reserve of devotion. He opened his eyes, recognized her, and giving her one final look, he died. Nancy Reagan and the family called his final great communication a "wonderful gift."

Now juxtapose this story of anguish — as well as love, grace, and devotion — with euthanasia in the Netherlands, which will now be applied to patients with Alzheimer's. The best view of it is found in a book by a nursing-home doctor named Bert Keizer. In Dancing with Mr. D. Keizer describes several euthanasia cases in which he provided lethal injections. In every case, he depicts the lives of frail and dying people under his care as pointless, useless, ugly, grotesque. Those with whom he interacts all seem to share these views, including his colleagues, family members of patients, and the patients themselves — allowing Keizer to kill patients without bad conscience.

One man he describes probably has lung cancer but the diagnosis is never certain. When a colleague asks, "Why rush?" while pointing out that the man isn't suffering terribly, Keizer snaps, "Is it for us to answer this question? All I know is that he wants to die more or less upright and that he doesn't want to crawl to his grave the way a dog crawls howling to the side walk after he's been hit by a car."

Keizer either doesn't know or doesn't care that with proper medical treatment, people with lung cancer don't have to die in unmitigated agony. The next day, he lethally injects the patient, telling his colleagues as he walks to the man's room, "If anyone so much as whispers cortisone [a palliative agent] or 'uncertain diagnosis,' I'll hit him."

Another patient Keizer kills is disabled by Parkinson's disease. The patient requests euthanasia, but before the act can be carried out, he hesitates after receiving a letter from his religious brother who warns that God is against suicide. This upsets Keizer, who writes: "I don't know what to do with such a wavering death wish. It's getting on my nerves. Does he want to die or doesn't he? I do hope we won't have to go over the whole business again, right from the very start."

Keizer no doubts thinks of himself as a terribly compassionate physician. Let's hope he never gets hit by a car and treated by a doctor like him.