Television Reviews : ‘Let My Daughter Die’ Probes Legal, Moral Issues

“Let My Daughter Die,” tonight’s presentation of “Frontline,” is an emotionally charged ride on the horns of a modern moral and legal dilemma (9 p.m. Channel 15; 10 p.m. Channels 28 and 50).

As the result of severe brain damage from a car accident, 30-year-old Nancy Cruzan of Missouri is trapped in what is known medically as “a persistent vegetative state.” Her still-distraught father Joe calls it “the life of the living dead,” a layman’s description whose accuracy is painfully borne out by many close-ups of Nancy’s unfocusing eyes and unresponsive face as she lies in her hospital bed.

Nancy’s vital organs function by themselves, but she can’t eat or drink. She is kept alive by food pumped into her stomach through a surgically implanted tube.

Now, after five years of anguish and of hoping and praying for a medical miracle that doctors say can never come, Joe Cruzan and his wife Joyce have decided to do what they think Nancy herself would want them to do: Let her die.

But, rather than turning off a machine that artificially keeps her alive, letting Nancy die means letting her starve to death. That process could take as long as 15 days and is not only ethically reprehensible to the medical profession but also specifically forbidden by Missouri state law.

Producer Elizabeth Arledge intimately and unobtrusively inserts viewers into the agony of the Cruzans’ choice, from the point where a tear-choked Joe tries but cannot tell a hospital support group of their decision to stop feeding Nancy to the meetings with an ACLU-supplied lawyer who is still fighting their case, which may take another three years to resolve.

“Let My Daughter Die,” which notes that the state pays the $130,000 a year it costs to care for Nancy (who could live into her 60s), is discomforting and depressing.

However, it poignantly and compellingly addresses important moral questions that individuals hope they’ll never have to face but that society must soon answer: Who has the right to decide how much or how little medical treatment a patient should get, and who has the right to decide whether the 10,000 patients in the United States like Nancy should live or die?