Jewish Law Responds to American Law 155
court’s decision paralleled its provision?! which was designed to “address situations in which a physician or health-care provider is unwilling to make and record a determination of terminal condition, or to respect the medically reasonable decision of the patient regarding withholding or withdrawal of life-sustaining procedures, due to personal convictions.” Brophy was moved to another medical facility that acceded to the request of the family.” He died shortly thereafter.
That same year a California court extended the parameters of the ethical questions.?”” Elizabeth Bouvia was a twenty-eightyear-old quadriplegic suffering from cerebral palsy. She was bedridden in a hospital and suffered constant pain?’ She petitioned the court to remove her feeding tube but the trial court refused.”® The Court of Appeals reversed that court and authorized her to do 50,” on the basis of the right of a patient to control her own body.?*
This painful and distressing debate has become a part of the popular ethical challenges that are constantly thrust before us. A former correspondent for the New York Times wrote most poignantly about the emotional tautness that results from watching a loved one complete life in constant pain.“My cousin Florence Hosch finally died the Wednesday before Christmas, about a thousand days after she had wished to.”?*!
The best-known American exponent of hastening death through euthanasia and assisted suicide is Dr. Jack Kevorkian. ? He has been an active participant in assisted suicides and has been indicted several times in Michigan for violating that state s law banning assisted suicides.” Reacting to the third acquittal of Dr. Kevorkian on assisted-suicide charges in Michigan , the delegates at the American Medical Association voted to continue the group's policy opposing such action on the part of a physician. During the same period of time that Dr. Kevorkian has been active both in advocating changes to the legal status of physicians who assist patients in committing suicide, and in assisting some individuals to commit suicide,” ballot initiatives to legalize physician-assisted suicides were before voters in severdl jurisdictions. Defeated in California ®* and Washington, pe such initiative was passed in Oregon ®® but a federal judge ne it down because it failed to ensure equal protection under the law.?’ The law was subsequently rewritten and again Wi approved by the voters of that state.?* This action followed the