I’m sorry, these parents are shrinking behind their supposed religious beliefs.

They need to step up and do what’s best for their child.

Keeping him artificially sustained on life-support, with no chance of recovery, ain’t it – no matter what it costs.

Whenever a parent with good insurance willing to pay, the hospital fights to keep someone on life support. I honestly believe it is all about the money for hospitals.

The reason I posted the link was to help you better understand what these people grapple with. I was hoping that you’d see that, much like the common law, Judaism applies accepted principles and doctrines to new situations. Quibble all you want with these principles, but they are arrived at induction from the Talmud and other authoritative primary sources and are adapted to new situations. So when you wrote that these were “stock answers” I wasn’t exactly sure what you meant: Are the moral assumptions the Talmud makes outmoded and incapable of serving as frameworks from which to evaluate contemporary modern issues (and it is these given assumptions that you call “stock answers”), or do you think that Judaism has a cookbook that provides magical answers for every situation–nothing needs to be reworked to fit new realities? I think you meant the former and you’re entitled to your opinion. I just want you to appreciate that many modern situations have analogues in the Talmud where absolute moral pronouncements were made. These pronouncements aren’t just lifted and applied blindly to modern situations; there is a deliberative process that takes into account new realities.

My point was that this isn’t closed-minded resistance to modernity. These people believe for whatever reason they do. Their religion takes a position on the metaphysical reality of when one is considered dead. To say that their Fifth Century morality did not anticipate the reality of a brain-dead person on life support does not disturb this metaphysical determination.

This is the precise problem of applying First Century moral codes to the modern world. We are better served by developing our own solutions than relying on stock answers from ancient texts that could not have possibly anticipated the issues that technology imposes upon morality.

http://www.jlaw.com/Articles/brain.html

If the child would die off life support and the parents keep him on it anyway, that’s defying God’s will. I find that a poor basis for a religious argument.

N.B., I’m not trying to be flip, and I’m certainly not arguing against using modern medicine when there’s a realistic chance of improvement. But you can’t “pick and choose” your beliefs according to what’s convenient at the time. If you want to live by the orthodox law, accept the consequences.

I think it would be hard to lose a child, especially such a young one. But I think that in this case, the parents are being selfish and need to let their child go.

I have no such qualms. In a case of irreversible disease resulting in brain death, the hospital should not be compelled to provide life sustaining measures at no charge. If the parents are so inclined, they should bear the cost themselves. It is far too easy to insist on principle when someone else carries the burden of payment or fulfillment. Maybe Bush and his neocon friends should have learned that rule 8 years ago.