As I sat in my high school Anatomy & Physiology class, I distinctly remember our teacher, Mrs. Nesselroth telling us that it was the absence of brain waves that is the definitive threshold to death.  That is the point of no return.

We bombarded her with questions of ‘heart stopping’ and the like, but there have been instances of coming back from those.  The one definitive line is the absence of brain waves.  It’s now literally decades later and I still remember that lesson.

Did I mention that in high school I entertained the idea of becoming a doctor?

I was in high school when I watched a movie on cable television by the name of Whose Life Is It Anyway?; it was released in 1981 and starred Richard Dreyfuss and Christine Lahti.  It tells the story of sculptor Ken Harrison who is paralyzed from the neck down after a car accident.  He fights for the right to be discharged from the hospital which would effectively kill him.

He was defined by his work as a sculptor and since he was no longer able to sculpt and fulfil his joy, he wanted to end his life.  He argued in court that definition of life entails self-sufficiency, and he no longer was self-sufficient.  In his eyes, he was effectively already dead.

That argument too as stuck with me.

I spend many late afternoons in my youth watching M*A*S*H.  I have watched all the episodes and have a distressing amount of its dialogue committed to memory.  It’s set in the 1950’s during the Korean War.  There are countless scenes in the operating room and in the compound.  The two elements that were consistent through the show.  First, only medical personnel attempted to do resuscitations.  Second, they declared death once the heart stopped.

Why is this interesting?  These days you can get CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) training for free.  Anyone can do this, not just medical professionals.  The training has even changed over time.  Mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was synonymous with CPR.  It is no longer part of the training; they found that administering chest compressions was sufficient.

Additionally, the standards by which we define death has changed over time.  As our medical technology improves, the boundaries by which we define death have moved.  Similarly, as our technology improves conditions that may be considered terminal are considered survivable.  If we were to go back far enough, losing a limb would be considered a mortal wound; it no longer is.

We can interject all kinds of cultural practices, but at the end of the day, the legal and medical definition of death is rarely contested, and moreover, it may change over time based on our technological advancements.

Medical technology has made many other advancements as well, not just in the realm of prolonging life.  I endured kidney stones; they’re incredibly painful though generally not dangerous (unless you get blockage with both kidneys).  We’ve developed technologies to break up kidney stones or remove them.

We developed technology to alleviate pain.  We introduced wonders in prosthetics that enhance our ability after injuries.  We addressed some of our worries about vanity with plastic surgery and botox.  Isn’t technology wonderful?

Early incubators used for premature babies were often calibrated with too much oxygen.  This led to many babies developing a film over their eyes and becoming blind.  We tried.  We failed.  We learned.  We improved.  We learned to calibrate them appropriately to effectively eliminate this tragic side-effect.

Let’s picture this as a hypothetical.  A woman is driving home from work the way she does every day.  There is major commotion on the freeway, and she stops.  The driver behind her does not see her until the last moment and is unable to stop in time.  Her car is smashed into bits.  She sustains head injuries and is taken into the hospital.  They doctor work on her tirelessly, but ultimately, they were unable to revive her.  She is legally and medically pronounced dead.  The doctors elect to keep her on life support to keep her heart pumping to give the family an opportunity to say goodbye.

Her husband arrives at the hospital and tells the staff that she’s pregnant; the pregnancy is unharmed and viable.  He had discussed the issue with his wife, and she did not want to be kept alive through extraordinary means.

Here’s the interesting question…  Is it ethical to keep the corpse pumping blood in order to deliver the pregnancy?  Or do we try to prematurely deliver the pregnancy?  I intentionally did not mention how far along the woman was in her pregnancy.

I imagine that if we were able to prematurely deliver the pregnancy, we would.  It brings up the two points above:

• First, can we legitimately define life when we have not established self-sufficiency as in the movie above?  Human life is not meant to be parasitic (biologically relying on another organism to survive).
• Second, we comfortably allow the definition of death to be medically and legally defined by our technology (and advances in the field may extend that line).  If we accept that can define one bookend in life, why not simply allow the medical and legal definition of when life begins by the same standards?

This is the idea.  Life medically and legally begins when we can deliver the pregnancy and it can survive without a human host.  Each culture will treat it differently of course, but for the purposes of medical and legal matters, if we cannot deliver the pregnancy, we cannot define ‘life’ and hence we cannot terminate such life.  Makes sense, right?

We already define death (the end of life) this way; its limits are bound by medical technology.  It only makes sense to also define birth (the start of life) this way; its limits are bound by medical technology.  If you think about it, they’re just the two halves of the pair of bookends.

The members of a Catholic church can choose to believe that two people are still married ‘until death does them part’.  However, if a couple elects to divorce, what the church chooses to believe is of little consequence. The couple is legally no longer married; anything else is cultural baggage.  Naturally, the church can elect to expulse those members of the church, but there are no legal implications about said marriage. 

Similarly, all other definitions of life are cultural biases and are bound by the restrictions of separation of church and state.  Yes, this would mean that if a woman elects to abort a pregnancy, there is no implication of ‘life’ if the pregnancy is not along far enough to deliver.

I’m not being intentionally callous about the topic of terminating a pregnancy; it’s not like picking what you’re having for lunch.  I think that it’s a deeply personal decision that everyone needs to evaluate with care.  No one can ever be in your position and know the implications of that decision that will affect the rest of your life.  In some ways, you’ll never know what the other end of that fork on the road will bring.

That said, there are many other decisions in life that will, without a doubt, affect its outcome.  We choose which school to attend (or whether to attend at all).  We choose to move to an entirely different city from where we grew up.  We choose who (when and where) we are going to marry.  We choose whether to accept a job offer.  Our country should not govern those decisions for you either.