Jewish Law Responds to American Law 153
guardian but on the action of a physician. Clarence Herbert was a fifty-five-year-old who lapsed into a permanent coma following surgery.” At the request of the family the physicians removed the patient from a respirator and discontinued intravenous feeding.'” Following Herbert's death the physicians were charged with murder and indicted by a trial court.’”” The Court of Appeals interposed a writ dismissing the action on the grounds that withholding life support was a passive omission and there was no duty to treat the patient as there was a lack of consent.!® In Cruzan the court agreed that the due process clause would give a competent adult the right to reject medical treatment but it avoided ruling on the other issues.!* Some courts have taken the position that lifesaving procedures cannot be ordered for a competent adult who refuses treatment on a religious basis.
Eminent bioethicists who engage in spirited debate have taken and still maintain polar positions in response to the matched, agonizing moral questions of the right of human beings to permit life to cease and to shorten life by hastening death and actively terminating life. Leon Kass argues strenuously against the concept that there is a right to hasten death through assisted suicide or euthanasia.®! Ronald Green responds directly by affirming the right of competent individuals to make decisions with regard to their own existence.2”> Ronald Dworkin , also an eminent jurisprudential thinker , has defined the issue for those who would grant individuals the right to determine the time to end pain.
The life of a single human organism commands respect and protection, no matter in what form or shape...?> Someone who thinks his own life would go worse if he lingered near death on a dozen machines for weeks or stayed biologically alive for years as a vegetable believes that he is showing more respect for the human contribution to the sanctity of his life if he makes arrangements in advance to avoid that, and that others show more respect for his life if they avoid it for him.2%:
Death has dominion because it is not only the start of nothingbut the end of everything, and how we think and talk iki shows how important it is that life end appropriately, that dea keeps faith with the way we want to have lived.”"