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146 Alan Sokobin
does Jewish law respond to the dictates of state law dealing with the definitions of death, hastening or delaying death, and post mortem examinations?'?
New medical technology, undreamed of in the science fiction literature of my youth, has created a new and sometimes uncomfortable tension between the law of the land and Halakhah . The search for patterns of societal assent with regard to some of these technologies and the need of society to give order to the
processes which these technologies are utilized has created an
uncomfortable dynamic tension. There is a new word to be found in the lexicon of bioethical concerns, legisogenic.'* This word defines the very present process of legally induced, medically inappropriate treatment. An astute observer of the legal burden which accompanies some of the life and death decisions in modern medicine has defined the difficulty.
Death is a natural process and a uniquely personal experience. If pressed to categorize it, most would probably term the major controversies surrounding it ethical, rather than medical or legal. Nevertheless, there is an increasing trend to ask the courts whether life-sustaining treatment should be withheld from patients who are unable to make this decision themselves. Judges are asked to decide this question, not because they have any special expertise, but because only they can provide the physicians with civil and criminal immunity for their actions. In seeking this immunity, legal considerations quickly transcend ethical and medical judgments. 3!
Halakhah has had to face the same diverse bioethical issues created in these past decades as had secular law. At times there has been harmony and assent between the two systems of law. In some other tormenting issues there has been disagreement.
The first issue became a legal one in this nation with the confluence of several essential legal factors. In a technologically more naive time the legal definition of death had simply been the absence of life.“Death is the opposite of life; it is the termination of life.”13 Now there was a new medical definition of death by the authoritative Harvard Medical School report.’ This report was the result of innovations in medical technology which have resulted in machines that artificially maintain cardiorespiratory functions. The use of the new sophisticated respirators makes it possible, in spite of total and irreversible loss of the function of the brain, to maintain the operation of the heart and lungs for a limited period of time.’ It became clear to practicing physicians