Just as I choose a ship to sail in or a house to live in, so I choose a death for my passage from life.
-- Seneca (4 B.C.-A.D. 65)
Nancy Cruzan, now 32, has done nothing for the past seven years. She has not hugged her mother or gazed out the window or played with her nieces. She has neither laughed nor wept, her parents say, nor spoken a word. Since her car crashed on an icy night, she has lain so still for so long that her hands have curled into claws; nurses wedge napkins under her fingers to prevent the nails from piercing her wrists. "She would hate being like this," says her mother Joyce. "It took a long time to accept she wasn't getting better." If they chose, the Cruzans could slip into Nancy's room some night, disconnect her feeding tube, and face the consequences. But instead they have asked the U.S. Supreme Court for permission to end their daughter's life.
The Cruzan petition not only marks the first time the court has grappled with the agonizing "right to die" dilemma; it may well be the most wrenching medical case ever argued before the high bench. To begin with, Nancy is not dying. She could live 30 years just as she is. And since she is awake but unaware, most doctors agree that she is not suffering. But her parents are suffering, for it is they who live with her living death. They are so convinced Nancy would not want to go on this way that they have asked the courts for authorization to remove her feeding tube and "let her go." A lower-court judge gave that permission, but the Missouri Supreme Court, affirming "the sanctity of life," reversed the ruling. Now the U.S. high court must consider whether the federal Constitution's liberty guarantees, and the privacy rights they imply, include a right to be starved to death for mercy's sake.
Cases that tell people how to live their private lives arouse passionate controversy and are correspondingly difficult to settle, as the court found after its landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. There are 10,000 other patients like Cruzan in the U.S., and their families are waiting and watching. "I'm riding on the Cruzans' coattails," says St. Louis marketing consultant Pete Busalacchi, whose daughter Christine lies in the same Missouri rehabilitation center as Cruzan. "Maybe it would have been best if she had died that night," he says, referring to Christine's 1987 auto accident. "This has been a 34-month funeral." And like many Americans, Pete Busalacchi believes a family's private tragedy should not be a battleground for right-to-life interest groups, politicians or judges. "This is for individuals," he insists. "My suggestion is to take Nancy to the Supreme Court and wheel her in and ask, 'Do you want to live like this?' "
At the moment, most Americans seem to agree with Busalacchi. In a poll conducted last month for TIME/CNN by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 80% of those $ surveyed said decisions about ending the lives of terminally ill patients who cannot decide for themselves should be made by their families and doctors rather than lawmakers. If a patient is terminally ill and unconscious but has left instructions in a living will, 81% believe the doctor should be allowed to withdraw life-sustaining treatment; 57% believe it is all right for doctors in such cases to go even further and administer lethal injections or provide lethal pills.