Jewish Law Responds to American Law 151
nological abilities. In April 1993 a twenty-eight-year-old woman was shot and declared brain dead. She was seventeen-weeks pregnant and placed on life support equipment. Three-and-a half-months later a baby boy was taken from her“dead body” by Cesarean birth. Restating Lord Jakobovits ’ amazement that medically and halakhically a dead woman cannot contain a viable fetus, but that is what happened; a dead woman was delivered of a live baby.'%4
Responding to the new technologies and the painful moral exigencies that derived from the now extant medical abilities, the Hemlock Society was formed in 1980 to campaign for the right of a terminally ill person to choose voluntary euthanasia its justification is in the book Final Exit. The motto of the Hemlock Society is:“Good Life, Good Death.”1%® Men and women facing an agonizing terminal illness, coupled with the often accompanying erosion of family welfare, began to contemplate what was termed a suicide that was“rational and reasonable.”*¢’
Secular American society has struggled excruciatingly with the moral challenge in what is now termed bioethics'®® for over four decades. Since the early 1970s there have been an accelerating number of cases involving the law in the attempt to give legal potency to individuals and families facing the life and death conundrums created by accident or illness.'” The bestknown examples are probably the well-publicized cases of Karen Quinlan!” and Nancy Cruzan.!'”! The twenty years on the legal road from the 1976 Quinlan to the 1997 Supreme Court decisions on doctor-assisted suicide!” have been torturous and painful.
The“seminal decision”!”® in this field is In re Quinlan.1”* Karen Ann Quinlan suffered brain damage and lapsed into a coma when she spontaneously and inexplicably stopped breathing.1” As tests showed some brain activity, she could not be declared to be legally dead and was maintained bRhatrespira® tor.!”® After an extended period in which she was maintained in this vegetative state, her father requested that the court authorize her physicians to cease life support.” The court responded affirmatively and held that a patient's right to refuse treatment is% element of the right of privacy." Where a bationt is legally incompetent, a guardian may exercise that right.
A year later Joseph Saikewicz, a sixty-seven- Yenbalh Se y retarded patient, developed incurable leukemia. Hsp y cians were prepared to attempt to prolong his life with chemo