X-Message-Number: 17887 From: Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 13:17:59 EST Subject: Re: CryoNet #17874 - #17884 While I share Kevin Spoering's low opinion and suspicion of Ashcroft generally, I think cryonicists should view the Oregon decision in a somewhat different light. I personally oppose all "right to die" legislation and agitation such as by Kevorkian etc on the grounds that it sanctions death as the inevitable fate of all and is an opening wedge toward doctor and relative-directed death when the patient is incapacitated, very much a mixed motive situation. I recall that when my mother, at the advanced age of 88, became strangely and rather suddenly disoriented while in the hospital, the primary orientation of medical personnel in attendance was to "let her go; her time has come." My inquiries to her attending physician were met with what seemed to me a rather chilly response and a concern on his part that he needed her bed for other patients, so if she lasted, we would somehow have to figure out a way of managing her care elsewhare. She obligingly faded away in a few days without much awareness of what was going on. The doctor, I suspect off-handedly, assigned "cancer" as the cause of death, on what evidence we were never told; I suspect the impicit diagnosis was "old age." Her surviving children and friends including myself were probably complicit in this process through silence and deference to the medical establishment. Her demise was perhaps aided [and hastened?] by her own "living will." I think cryonicists have to be suspicious of all such arrangements and the mixed motives of caregivers in hospital and hospice situations. All this will change, of course, when cryonics becomes an acceptable, then accepted, then popular option for the critically ill, but those days still seem a long way off. Meanwhile we should be carefull in choosing sides in battles like this. Implicit in the belief in the extension of human life is or should be a strong value in the preciousness of all human lives and their extension. For the same reason, even as a life-long liberal and supporter of equality between the sexes , I am very uneasy about legalized abortion. I can live with the Roe-v-Wade formula and we will never resolve the conundrum of when life actually begins, but I cannot abide the notion that the destruction of a viable fetus is the right of anyone, including the carryiing mother. Ron Havelock, Shady Side Maryland, now happily signed-up CI member. Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=17887