"We would like to care for Jesse in our home like any loving parents would," Gayle [Koochin, mother of brain-dead 6-year-old cancer patient Jesse kept "alive" on life support] said. "It's not as if he's been in a coma for a year. I can't believe they can take this decision away from his parents. They would have to kill him for him to die." —
That's a sad lesson to have to learn that late. (Emph. mine.)
I usually think of this quote in the context of abortion, but Steven Jay Gould wrote it in an essay on his own cancer:
We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. Thus we hope to find an unambiguous "beginning of life" or "definition of death," although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.
