From the CBS Early Show, [UK] Times, USA Today:

Christopher Anderson, author of an unauthorized biography called “Somewhere in Heaven,” says a pact with his wife kept actor Christopher Reeve alive for ten years after the accident that caused his paralysis. Anderson said Reeve was bent on suicide after being thrown from a horse, but his wife Dana convinced him to keep going.

“She said ‘I still love you.’ Then she made a pact with him. ‘Hold on for two years, if you still feel this way two years from now we will reconsider this question.’ She said that was just a sales ploy,” said Anderson.

… “She wasn’t just resilient,” he said. “She was joyful about life. I think that really came through. She made jokes about being called a saint all the time. She didn’t like it. She said ‘I’m just a woman whose husband fell off a horse and I’m taking care of him and that’s what you do.’”

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Earlier post: Dad was a superman to the end

From the BBC, [UK] Telegraph:

The Welsh parents of a girl with a terminal illness say they will fight a hospital’s decision to withhold life-saving treatment. They say doctors told them their daughter, who is on a ventilator, was at the end of her life and that a judge would have to authorize further care.

Amber Hartland, 6, has Infantile Tay-Sachs, and is almost totally paralyzed and unable to speak.

“We believe it is about money,” said Lesley Hartland, Amber’s mother. “But my father, my husband’s mother and father, they have all paid their taxes and have never used the health service. Everyone is entitled to the health service.”

“Amber has a right to life,” she said.

Hospital sources said cost was not an issue, and that the child was receiving high quality and compassionate care.

From the [Melbourne, Australia] Herald Sun, New Zealand Herald, [New South Wales] Daily Telegraph:

Australian newscaster Tracey Spicer (left) says she considered suffocating her mother in 1999 as an “act of mercy” to end her “immense pain and suffering” from pancreatic cancer. The revelation, in an opinion piece, stirred new controversy in a nation that is deeply divided over the recent convictions of two women in the death of a man with Alzheimer’s disease.

Spicer said her intention was to prompt a public discussion, not to persuade Australians either way about whether euthanasia should be legalized. In her commentary, she said, “I knew it was the right thing to do. But as I looked down at the woman who gave me life, I knew that I could not take hers.” Her mother died a few hours later.

(Herald Sun photo.)

Christine Rosen, writing in the Wall Street Journal, memorializes Harriet McBryde Johnson as someone who made society look at disability as a natural part of the human experience. Johnson, she says, demonstrated that disability transcends the convenient categories that often stymie political discourse: secular or religious, liberal or conservative. Johnson held up a mirror to a society whose acceptance of disability wanes as its scientific powers to eliminate disability grow.

As an example, Rosen cites the “rapid near-disappearance of people with Down syndrome.”

As a culture, we have made what Amy Laura Hall of Duke University Divinity School calls a “democratic calculus of worth” regarding Down Syndrome. And that calculus has resulted in a society hostile to people who refuse to make the culturally acceptable choice of ridding themselves of a disabled child before she is born.

… if choice and prevention produce a culture that equates disability with irresponsible parenting decisions, then the homage we pay to accommodation will prove hollow indeed. And as the population ages, and more Americans find themselves living with disabilities, questions about worth at the end of life will become even more pressing. Thanks to people such as Harriet Johnson, we have not yet reached the point where accommodation has given way to neglect or elimination. But we would do well to respect what Ms. Johnson’s own life so ably demonstrated: People with disabilities, she said, “have something the world needs.”

Christine Rosen is senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society, and the author of Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.

From the Palm Beach Post:

Seven months ago, Karen Weber had a stroke. Now she’s in a nursing home and her family members are battling over whether to remove the feeding tube that keeps her alive. She is paralyzed on her left side and unable to speak, but breathes on her own.

Raymond Weber says his wife is in a vegetative state. He is seeking to get the feeding tube removed and his wife moved to hospice care. Mrs. Weber’s mother says she is alert and responsive. An Okeechobee County judge has issued an injunction blocking the removal of the tube until he decides whether Mrs. Weber is capable of making her own decision.

Columnist Tom Utley in the UK Daily Mail says he’s wary of Debbie Purdy’s efforts to challenge Britain’s assisted suicide law. Purdy (left, celebrating court victory with husband Omar Puente) has multiple sclerosis and says she plans to kill herself at Dignitas, a controversial euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. She says she wants to make sure that her husband will not be prosecuted if he aids her in making arrangements for assisted suicide.

Utley thinks Purdy is really trying to legalize assisted suicide in Britain — a prospect he finds alarming.

In the Netherlands, MPs voted in 2000 to legalise euthanasia, assuring the world: ‘This is only for people who are in great pain and have no prospect of recovery.’

Within three years, more than one per cent of all deaths in Holland were being deliberately inflicted by doctors.

We saw the same phenomenon here with abortion. When it was legalised in 1967, we were assured it would be carried out only if continuing the pregnancy would mean risk to the life or mental health of the mother, risk to the physical or mental health of existing children or ’substantial’ risk of the child being born ’seriously handicapped’.

Today, abortion is widely seen simply as an alternative to contraception, and 500 fetuses are killed every day. Do we really want to go down that road with euthanasia?

If so, how long will it be before doctors start bumping off old women like my grandmother, who say they want to die but don’t really mean it?

Related story: Woman wins right to review of law on assisted suicide