When human life is utilitarian calculus, anything can happen

Camosy is an associate professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University in New York, and for most of his academic life, he has waged a quixotic battle against often-hidden cultural forces that, except for the pandemic and the scrutiny it has focused on medical decisions, might have gone unnoticed.
    

Hickson, an African American with a serious brain injury, was hospitalized with COVID-19 at St. David’s Hospital South Austin. Despite his cognitive impairments, his wife Melissa said he could solve math problems and play trivia. His physical condition admittedly was grave. He was receiving food and water through a stomach tube.
    

Shortly after being admitted to the hospital, a family dispute over the course of his care ensued, which resulted in the power to make those decisions being given to the state and the hospital’s medical team.
    

While Melissa wanted Michael to continue to be given food and hydration in the ICU in hopes that her husband could beat back the disease, his doctor told her any further medical intervention would not improve his “quality of life.” The medical team and the state had determined that only hospice care would be offered.
 

A shocking conversation
    

On her own, Melissa secretly recorded a conversation she had with the doctor, which is legal in Texas. Melissa did not want her husband intubated, but she did want him to be given food, water, oxygen and medicine to give him any chance to improve. Certainly, that could not be considered burdensome treatment.
    

The doctor remarked that any aggressive treatment would not “help him improve anything” because “as of right now, the quality of life … he doesn’t have much of one.”
    

Melissa was shocked by that answer.
    

“What do you mean? Because he’s paralyzed with a brain injury, he doesn’t have quality of life?”
    

“Correct.”
    

The doctor went on to tell Melissa that he had cared for three other patients who survived in Michael’s condition, but he qualified that by saying Michael’s case didn’t “fit those three.” The defining difference, the doctor told Melissa, was that his “quality of life is different from theirs. … They were walking and talking people.”
    

But the medical panel had made its decision. Michael died of pneumonia six days after the withdrawal of nutrition and hydration had weakened and then stilled his body. He left behind a wife and five kids.
    

This was not a case in which the hospital faced a shortage of beds during a grave moment of the pandemic. It was a case, Fordham’s Camosy says, of euthanasia, pure and simple.
    

“According to the Catholic moral theological definition of euthanasia, it’s an act or omission which aims at death,” Camosy said. “Any time there’s a ‘quality of life’ judgment made – where it’s not the burden of the treatment – that’s a  concern. Even his wife didn’t want him to be intubated. 
    

“The doctor thought that what made him different from the others who survived is that they were walking and talking. The doctor had every chance to say, ‘He’s just too sick, he’s not going to recover, there’s no point.’ No. He specifically mentioned three others in his situation … and what makes them different is they were walking and talking, and he was not.”
    

In his book, “Resisting Throwaway Culture,” Camosy says very often language and practices are employed “to hide, to throw away people from us so we’re not confronted with them.” 
 

Possible silver lining
    

Viewed through the lens of more than 134,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. and a global economic paralysis, it is difficult to imagine anything positive emerging from these last seven months. However, Camosy says tragedy has a way of creating a thunderclap of conscience.
    

“If there’s a silver lining in this pandemic, it has forced us to look – and now the question is, will we do anything now that we’ve seen?” Camosy said. “The medical community is very good at not allowing public scrutiny of these kinds of situations. But, anecdotally,  from what I saw on social media and from the people who emailed me or otherwise got in touch with me after they saw my social media posts, plenty of people have said, ‘This was me.’ ‘This was my cousin.’ ‘This was my wife.’ They were very dramatic statements about this not being an isolated situation.”
    

Even a month after Hickson’s death, Camosy said only one major news outlet had picked up the story. On its face, this was a heartbreaking saga with incredible bells and whistles that should have qualified as manna from heaven for the media. Camosy surmises one reason the story did not create a firestorm is that it was first reported by Texas Right to Life and dismissed as pro-life propaganda.
    

“We saw that with Kermit Gosnell at first,” Camosy said.
    

Michael’s story touched on nearly every element of today’s culture wars, particularly the battle over the dignity of human life. As Camosy wrote: “What if I told you that, last month, a helpless African American and disabled man was euthanized against the will of his wife by a powerful institution rife with structural racism?”
    

So, why the radio silence?
    

“Medical institutions seem to be given a pass from most major media, despite their huge amount of power, despite their also having a really checkered past with regard to race.,” Camosy said. “I guess maybe the focus is on law enforcement now – on the left and the right – and so this just slipped through the cracks.”
    

As the pandemic began, Camosy’s was among the first voices crying out when several states, including New York, ordered elderly COVID patients who did not need ICU care back into nursing homes, which led to an explosion of cases amidst the most vulnerable population possible.
    

“Fifty percent of people in nursing homes have some kind of dementia, and dementia is listed as one of the most important co-morbidities for populations to be worried about,” Camosy said. “The idea that we would send thousands and thousands of COVID-positive patients into some of the worst spaces for the spread of the disease – where the most vulnerable patients are – was just an unbelievably terrible decision.”
    

Camosy believes the church can step up during the pandemic by offering its empty schools and convents as places where the elderly can be safely housed and their dignity respected.
    

“Especially, as the culture gets older, it would be a fantastic way the church could respond,” he said.
    

Camosy said another way to honor the dignity of the elderly is to pass legislation that would help families care for their aging parents in their homes.
    

“That would be ideal, especially in a pandemic,” Camosy said. “We’ve now realized how important it is to keep people at home. That’s another problem of the two-parent income trap. We just have so many people who need to work that taking care of loved ones is really difficult at times.”
 

A foreign language
    

At 45, Camosy is in his 13th year of teaching at Fordham, and he has thought deeply about how to enlighten his young, job-directed students with thinking that is foreign to them: The value of a human being cannot be based on utilitarian calculus.
    

“I don’t think kids get it, because at a place like Fordham – and in the Northeast in general – the kids have been largely trained by their parents and the culture to just achieve – to make goals and achieve goals,” Camosy said. “And so, that means, ‘Go wherever is necessary, even if it means moving across the country.’ That means their parents have to figure it out. Often, it’s the parents who are pushing and saying, ‘Don’t worry about me. Go live your dreams.’
    

“I wonder if we could have a countercultural message as a church about ‘localism,’ about putting down roots, and having multiple generations of family around to help take care of each other, especially as we age, and maybe a little less focus on telling our kids they can be and do whatever they want.”
    

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected]. Follow Camosy on Twitter @CCamosy.