MURDER OR MERCY: WHAT DO WE REALLY MEAN BY THE SANCTITY OF LIFE?
By Greggory Moore
A couple weeks ago, 88-year-old Roy Laird went to County Villa Healthcare Center in Seal Beach to see 86-year-old Clara, his wife of nearly 70 years. And, as it turns out, to kill her.
I caught this story on the TV news, and as I took in the details I guessed this was probably a mercy killing, even before a statement from the couple’s daughter, Kathy Palmateer, characterized it in exactly that way. As she told the Los Angeles Times,[i] Clara had suffered from dementia, which robbed her of the ability to walk, sit up, feed herself and generally recognize visitors. “Her mind was gone,” Clara’s daughter said. “It was a mercy killing.”
The Times reported that friends of Roy and Clara paint Roy as “a loyal and devoted husband [who] insisted on spoon-feeding [Clara] her meals and visit[ing] her three times a day.” One friend noted, “He would never get mad at her or lose his patience. Whatever she asked of him, that’s what he did.”
To some people, the kind of trustworthiness that Roy had established with Clara makes his walk into the nursing home with a .38 caliber revolver and using it to shoot his wife in the head all the more shocking. But that perspective tragically misses more than just the point.
From our earliest moments in life, we are being programmed. It’s a necessary, unavoidable state of affairs. Our very language is programmed into us. And that includes the language of our morality.
In our youth a lot of that moral programming is quite simplistic. A commandment like “Thou shalt not kill” is something a four-year-old understands.
Perhaps that’s okay. We probably don’t need young children puzzling over the Hebrew word ratsach, which is better translated as “murder” than “kill”—even though the distinction between the two concepts will prove rather important later in life.
The problem is that a lot of us never truly go beyond thinking about such a heady subject at that four-year-old level. Even many of us who don’t find much credibility in the story of a god who writes a list of prohibitions—with his finger, on stone tablets—that includes concern over how his name is used but tacitly condones slavery[ii] often don’t consider all of the nuances of the question, “To kill or not to kill?”
More likely, we—as with the majority of all people in all times and places—ingest the conventional wisdom of our culture without really tasting it. Thus, in 21st-century American society it is okay to kill in self-defense, okay to slaughter pigs and cows but not dogs and dolphins, okay to kill if the army generals say so, okay to kill in extreme cases of punishment.
But euthanasia is still not quite okay with society at large. A New York Daily News poll published concomitantly with its coverage of the Laird mercy killing found that only 44 percent of respondents were favor of legalizing euthanasia, with 51 percent against it. Although the results of a 2007 Gallup poll found that “49 percent of Americans say doctor-assisted suicide is morally acceptable, while 44 percent say it is morally wrong,” the difference seems to indicate that opinions about euthanasia depend a lot on the wording of the question. Because based on the pertinent laws within the U.S., support for euthanasia is actually much lower—only Washington, Oregon, and Montana have provisions for allowing physician-assisted suicide.
Roy Laird’s apparent mercy-killing of Clara, however, did not involve a physician. He walked into a nursing home and shot his wife in the head. And for many people that is enough to warrant subjecting Roy to imprisonment for the rest of his Claraless life.
Peruse any of the many reader comments complementing Internet coverage of this case and you find lots people in one or both of two camps, which we’ll call 1) “Law and Order” and 2) “It’s Just Wrong.”
“Thank you Orange County DA,” says a Times reader in the first camp regarding the district attorney’s choice to charge Roy with murder. “Glad to see that someone STILL realizes that no matter what activists call it euthansia [sic] or so-called ‘mercy killings’ are still MURDER!!!”[iii]
“There is no such thing as ‘Mercy killing,’” declares a reader from Camp #2. “None have the right to take away life; no matter how miserable it seems.”
It is heartening to see that most of the comments run more sympathetic and supportive. Example: “If we as a society have only the charge of murder to apply to this situation, it is a sad comment on the culture’s ability to deal with aging, sickness, dementia and compassion at the time of death. […] If this is ‘murder’ we have lost our way.”
I don’t believe anyone is in favor of our changing our laws against murder (i.e., in what I’ll lazily call the commonsensical sense, because no one reading these words doesn’t know what I mean); and I don’t think there are many people this side of the National Rifle Association who advocate loosening our gun laws.
To those in Camp #1, I say that any legal system worth its salt should have no trouble adjudicating an individual case on its actual, rather than its predetermined, merits (even before it gets into the hands of a sympathetic jury). To those in Camp #2, I say that any morality/god worth its salt would be able to do the same. And to both camps I would humbly offer that any application of legal or moral principles in which the minimization of suffering does not trump all other concerns should be discarded.
I’m always distressed to find how many of my neighbors will condemn someone like Roy. Unless it was Clara’s will to continue to suffer, to live on bereft of self, he did her perhaps the greatest service we can ever do to another: end another’s terminal suffering, even at our own peril.
You may be an individual who values quantity above quality of life and wish to live until your “natural” end, no matter the suffering. You might never have the stomach or the will to end a loved one’s life. That’s your business, and no one should tell you otherwise. But I’m not in that business. I pray that if I end up in a condition like Clara’s, I have someone who loves me enough to stop it there.[iv] And if I find a loved one reduced to such a state, may I be strong enough to perform that service.
If and when either of those days come, I hope our society will have progressed to the point where this act of compassion is not regarded by anyone as murder, because so doing only heaps avoidable suffering on top of tragedy.
For now, question Roy’s methodology, if you like—but don’t say it’s more dubious than depriving a man of his freedom because he refused to allow his life partner to continue down her unrecoverable spiral into living oblivion.
As a community, we would do better to recognize that aiding in the consensual cessation of another’s terminal suffering is the business only of the parties directly involved, not of some law or god too simplistic to distinguish between murder and euthanasia (from the Greek, eu ‘well’ + thantos ‘death’).
[i] Read the full story at http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mercy-kill-20101122,0,7622936,full.story.
[ii] See Exodus 20:10.
[iii] This and the following reader comments taken from http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010/11/88-year-old-man-charged-with-murder-in-alleged-seal-beach-mercy-killing.html.
[iv] Earlier, actually.
7 Comments
“I would humbly offer that any application of legal or moral principles in which the minimization of suffering does not trump all other concerns should be discarded.”
I would humbly offer that as long as you pledge allegiance to that half-baked idea, your world view will remain childish.
I would humbly offer that as long as Jason pledges allegiance to his half-baked idea, he will remain senile, and by the logic of Roy’s actions, should be euthanized in order to end the obvious mental suffering. Just kidding. But really:
If a legal system does not recognize the minimization of suffering as a top priority, then it aides and abets the opposite, which is the perpetuation of suffering–something our society has not figured out yet…
I think I understand your points, Greggory, and in the perfect world that so many “true-believers” envision; a world populated by nothing but people possessed of co-equal measures compassion and wisdom who are never, ever, motivated by anything but the most sincere and indisputable altruism, in such a workd we would need no laws prohibiting euthanasia.
But that world is unfortunately not this world. In this world people sometimes kill others (and violently) to suit their own selfish ends or out of some misguided sense of compassion and they do so under the pretext of ending another’s suffering. Such people never seem to give a thought for the suffering their selfish act may be causing others, such as their children or their grandchildren.
And some people presume to take matters into their own hands and make medical decisions they are not qualified to make. Because none of us can see all possible alternatives or all possible outcomes, I think it is most often wrong to make a conscious choice to end the life of another under the guise of compassion or sympathy.
I have no idea whether such is the case for Mr. Laird. Nor have I any idea what he will eventually be charged with and, once charged, whether he will ever be convicted and, if convicted, whether he will serve a single day in prison for his alleged crime.
But I do know this…what Mr. Laird chose to do, whatever his reasons, can now never be undone. And with that single violent act, he may have only succeeded in doing more damage to the rest of his family, than the medical condition of his now deceased wife could ever have accomplished on its own.
His children and grandchildren may have lost their mother and grandmother some time ago. But now they may very well likely lose their father and grandfather too.
Dementia runs in my family. In my eighth decade, I am keeping an eye out for it. My mother had it and died peacefully at nearly 101. It was not as totally disabling as in the Laird case, and yet for the last 5 years of her life, at least, my mother frequently expressed the wish to die.
She was a stubborn willful woman, and so had many unpleasant encounters from her disability. No, the last years of her life were not a blessing. She had provided well enough for herself that she had the benefit of trained nursing. Still, at best, it was a matter of enduring life.
My children have my signed documents indicating that I certainly wish no heroic measures be taken to preserve my life. I wish I could add to it that I wish for euthanasia when I can no longer recognize my surroundings. Is Kervorkian out of prison yet? I would appoint him my attending physician. But it just goes to show how dangerous it is to be ahead of your time.
“If a legal system does not recognize the minimization of suffering as a top priority, then it aides and abets the opposite, which is the perpetuation of suffering–something our society has not figured out yet…”
When Steven hands down his general views of morality, to be applied to cases that are specific, he inevitably aids and abets the perpetuation of suffering more than if Stevens world view had never been applied, but that’s okay, because Steven meant well, so Steven is not evil. Plus, he’ll be long gone when the shit hits the fan.
– All Far Left Liberals
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