I'm confident in guessing that there are few, if any, folks here who have not lived through the end stages of a friend's or family member's terminal illness. I've lost two friends, both younger than I, to metastisized cancer.

Jim ignored lesions on his skin - malignant melanoma - out of justified fear until another friend got him to the hospital, which put him in an experimental auto-immune therapy which, of course, ultimately failed. I used to visit him once or twice a week, until the cancer had taken his spinal chord. He was barely lucid by then - the following week he was mercifully comatose, but he lasted (that is, was artificially 'prolonged') two or three more weeks after that. It was during the time when he was still conscious but no longer aware of his surroundings that I wished the same mercy that we grant to our pets was available to him.

Tony was able, through his own stubborness added to a complete lack of health insurance, to die in relative dignity at home. A visiting health aide from the nearby hospice had left a certain amount of palliative morphine... I'll never know if Tony's wife purposefully overdosed him, but I would consider it an act of mercy if she had.

At the end of life there is a certain equivalency - but you're right about this, Ed: no one who champions the individual rights of human beings to decide their own fates would advocate imposing such a decision on another. Of course, the laws in America against euthanasia do just that...

Not very far from Princeton as the proverbial crow flies, but on the Pennsy' side of the Delaware, is an institution called Pleasant Manor. Most of its residents are survivors of severe birth defects: anencephalics, acute arrested development and the like. From one (perhaps unfeeling) perspective, they are the results of 'heroic efforts' to save a biological life that has no human qualities beyond residing in a human vessel.

I would not presume to put myself into the minds and hearts of those children's parents, but I can believe they held some hope that an infant could somehow miraculously 'grow out of' a permanent congenital condition. My guess is that some might have wished or prayed for a merciful swift end which did not come - they could only pray because any choice was denied through an equivalent imposition of societal mores.

As we have discovered in the debates about abortion, there is a difference - which should be unmistakeable - between guaranteeing the right to choose and the personal ethics of an individual's choice. Without needing to know how I might choose, I would feel I lived in a more compassionate world if I were at least granted the legal right.

E'