We will certainly have time to mull over the many perspectives on what it has meant to the lives of all involved. But we may not do so, if we let bioethics once again be deployed in its callous "sound bite" function to stamp "Sealed" on an episode that is anything but sealed. When Arthur Caplan once again performed the role as 'go-to' spokesman for the bioethics world, his response claimed the experience as a debate between pediatric medicine and disability activists:
"You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” said Art Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania bioethicist and MSNBC.com columnist.
But it’s certain that Ashley X’s case caused a seismic wave throughout pediatric medicine and the world of disability. It raised difficult and challenging questions about what’s in the best interest of children and young adolescents with disabilities. The controversy is going to continue to go on and I think that Dr. Gunther’s voice will be sorely missed.”
This comment is chilling, not only because of Caplan's insider position (salaried, one assumes) as MSNBC columnist and thus party to the press feeding frenzy, but because his disingenuous refusal to consider the role of the press, bioethicists, disability activists, and medical practitioners in the social context for Dr. Gunther's suicide casts depression (and other mental disabilities) as beyond knowledge, beyond commentary, beyond concern. "Those" suicidal people somehow aren't granted the same bioethical scrutiny as are the Ashley Xs of this world. And yet the tragedy of this awful story also belongs to Dr. Gunther and to his family if he had one as it does to Ashley X and her family.
What would happen if we actually opened up the whole question to discussion, rather than closing it down? If Arthur Caplan had asked simply, "What do we know about suicide?" rather than "You just can’t know what leads people to suicide,” we might actually have given ourselves space to consider how institutions of all kinds (press, bioethics, pediatrics, parenthood, the law) let something crucial escape their deliberative machines. And perhaps we would be able to step outside the tidy institutional structure of the dominant model of bioethics, whose procedures risk framing situations with such linear clarity that all the disturbing ambiguity escapes.
As we can see if we look at the parodic Goofus and Gallant cartoons in the latest Atrium, procedural clarity is not always the best, or even an adequate, response to the increasingly complex questions facing us as we live our liminal lives. That is why comics are so useful for bioethics. Rather than being linear and procedural, they are spatial, often ironic, even chaotic. They hold open space for multiple voices, rather than ceding all comment to the dominant voice, a bad state of things even when that voice speaks for bioethics. http://www.bioethics.northwestern.edu/atrium/atriumissue4.pdf
