New rules for playing God

A girl in California had her tonsils and other matter removed to relieve her sleep apnea, and then something terrible happened that left her brain-dead. The hospital considers her just plain dead but as long as machines keep her lungs breathing and her heart beating the family hopes for a miracle and wants the machines kept running. You may have seen this story somewhere and you may have noticed the passions it's stirred. It looks like an awful situation all around, while outsiders for whom it's just a news story look for someone to blame. Depending on who you read or hear, it's the hospital's fault or the family's fault, or it's the damned lawyer's fault that this is even a news story. For some the hospital is acting like a death panel; for others the girl's relatives are so many disgusting losers. I know a lot less about the story than some claim to so I abstain from judgment -- except for this. I noticed that the family (or was it their lawyer) accused the hospital of wanting to "play God" by taking the girl off life support. That sounded odd from a historical perspective. I remember Karen Ann Quinlan, whose parents wanted to take her off a hospital ventilator after a misadventure left her in a persistent vegetative state. Back then, the Quinlans and their supporters accused their hospital of "playing God" because the doctors wanted to keep Karen hooked up to life-support machines. At that time, it seems, "playing God" was the opposite of "letting nature take its course." In the current case, you might infer that, as far as the girl's family and their friends are concerned, "playing God" means something like "deciding who lives and who dies." The hospital will claim that that's already been decided, but my point is that, for at least some people, not to take all the heroic measures technology makes possible to sustain life is to "play God," while many people in Karen Ann Quinlan's generation (or that of her parents) thought the opposite. The change may not be so stark, however, if you decide that, in each generation, "playing God" really means "not doing what I want." Let's split the difference. Something probably has changed in our culture, but the more things change...