Cruzan Death Revives Religious Groups’ Debate of Euthanasia : Issue: Some fear ruling will open ‘floodgates’ to killing the disabled. Others support family’s decision to disconnect feeding tube.

The death of a comatose Missouri woman whose family won a long court battle to disconnect her from a feeding tube has rekindled an intense debate in the religious community over euthanasia.

Nancy Cruzan, 33, died Wednesday, 12 days after doctors removed a feeding tube at the request of her family. The family had approved the tube shortly after Cruzan was seriously injured in a 1983 car accident but in 1987 began seeking legal permission to remove it.

Human Life International of Gaithersburg, Md., an anti-euthanasia group headed by a Roman Catholic priest, issued a statement after Cruzan’s death saying that her death would “open the floodgates for the greatest number of legally sanctioned deaths of disabled people since Nazi Germany.”

And the American Life League of Stafford, Va., another anti-euthanasia organization with ties to the religious community, issued a statement that labeled legal and medical professionals involved in the removal of Cruzan’s feeding tube “accomplices to murder.”

Meanwhile, protests and continued court appeals by anti-euthanasia activists seeking a reconnection of the feeding tube in the days preceding Cruzan’s death drew rebukes from a group of mostly mainline church executives.

The church executives issued a prepared statement that said, “We urge that those who are attempting to disrupt the ruling of the court and the wishes of Nancy Cruzan and her family end their activities, and join us in respecting the judgments of the courts which have thoroughly examined the questions involved in the Cruzan case, and have concurred in the Cruzan family’s decision.”

Signing that statement were representatives of the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and the Unitarian Universalist Assn.

Participating in the anti-euthanasia protests and appeals in the last days of Cruzan’s life was the Center for Christian Activities, a Boca Raton, Fla., affiliate of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.

Supporters of the Center for Christian Activities began protesting, after the tube was removed, outside the Missouri Rehabitation Center in Mt. Vernon, Mo., where Cruzan was hospitalized.

On Dec. 21, U.S. District Judge Dean Whipple, sitting in Kansas City, rejected a petition from the Rev. Patrick Mahoney, director of the Center for Christian Activities, seeking resumption of intravenous feeding of Cruzan.

In a written ruling, Whipple said, “This court is mindful of the fact that this is the fifth petition of its kind filed this week in various Missouri courts. . . . In light of the history of this case, this court finds that any further action would be frivolous at best and an abuse of the legal process.”

Whipple also ruled that Mahoney, a Presbyterian, had no standing to bring a federal action.

In their statement, issued Dec. 21, the church leaders critical of the anti-euthanasia protests said, “Church leaders call on persons across the nation to lend their prayerful support to the family of Nancy Beth Cruzan as they courageously face the most difficult days in their life.

“They have acted with extraordinary faith and clarity, based on their belief that all of life and death are within God’s providence, to end an eight-year struggle to allow their daughter, who is in a persistent vegetative state, suffering from irrevocable brain damage, not to have her bodily functions kept operating artificially year after year.”

In June the U.S. Supreme Court, in a case closely watched by the religious community, upheld a Missouri Supreme Court ruling that the feeding tube could be removed only if “clear and convincing evidence” showed that Cruzan would have wanted treatment stopped.

Cruzan’s tube was removed Dec. 14 after a county probate judge, Judge Charles Teel Jr., ruled that it could be removed because clear evidence had been shown that she would not have wanted to be fed intravenously.

Evidence presented on her behalf included testimony from three friends who said they had had conversations with Cruzan in which Cruzan said she would never want to “live like a vegetable.”

As the case made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, it generated intense interest in the religious community, pitting proponents of euthanasia against those who believe euthanasia discriminates against the helpless.

When the U.S. Catholic Conference filed a petition opposing disconnection of the tube, a conference spokesman said, “Our position was that (Cruzan’s) situation should not be resolved by invoking a constitutional ‘privacy right’ which would outweigh all other legitimate interests in cases involving patients in her position.”

A spokeswoman for the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, which filed on behalf of the Cruzans, a United Methodist family, said the state was interfering with the rights of the family.