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Outsiders who have followed the case are similarly divided. Doctors acknowledge that they occasionally practice "judicious neglect," deciding, for example, against reviving a terminal cancer patient who has just gone into cardiac arrest or performing corrective surgery on a hopelessly retarded infant with a serious heart condition as well. Indeed, many doctors admit that the withholding of extraordinary medical care is a not uncommon practice at both ends of the life spectrum. Dr. Raymond Duff, for instance, revealed in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1974 that of 299 infants who died over a 2½-year period at Yale-New Haven Hospital, 43 had been allowed to die, after consultation with their parents, because of hereditary or congenital abnormalities.
Doctors defend such decisions as a part of the practice of medicine. "What is the point," asks one Manhattan physician, "of restarting a terminal cancer patient's stopped heart so that he can survive in agony for a few more weeks?" But almost all doctors are decidedly uneasy about terminating treatment once it has been started, especially if doing so will mean the certain death of a patient. Many doctors, after all, are taught to regard death as an enemy and to do all they can to defeat it—or at least to keep it at bay for a while. Many regard "pulling the plug" as an act akin to euthanasia, which is forbidden by both law and the medical code.
Still several surgeons sympathize with the Quinlans. "At this point in the process of dying, it is the survivors who count," says the University of Chicago's Dr. Chase P. Kimball. "I personally feel that individuals do not have a right over their body after a certain point in the life-death phase. It becomes the responsibility of those closest to them."
Exercising this responsibility would be easier if the courts were not involved, says Kimball. "A physician's task is to aid the patient, not to make the patient suffer unduly, and to use his judgment when to prolong and when not to prolong life. A court cannot decide in total detail what a physician is to do."
Doctors are not alone in their disapproval of a court's involvement in the case. "Some decisions are beyond the law's competence to make with any rigor or confidence in being right," says University of Chicago Law Professor Franklin Zimring. Questions of this kind are often decided outside the courtroom, according to Stanley Price, an attorney who also lectures at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health. Price believes that the Quinlan case has become a cause célèbre mainly because of doctors' growing concern over malpractice suits, which have increased significantly during the past decade. Says Dr. Laurens White of San Francisco: "Karen's luck ran out when the doctor put her on the respirator...Maybe, if she's lucky, she'll have a cardiac arrest."