The Right to Die

Who can play fate and how?

His doctor says Earle Spring should be allowed to die. Spring's wife and son concur. So does a probate court judge. Yet last week Spring, 78, who is senile, was still receiving the kidney dialysis treatments that sustain his life, while Justice Francis J. Quirico, of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, tried to decide if there was any new evidence to justify reopening arguments on whether Spring himself would prefer to die. Quirico's decision could be important for the increasing numbers of Americans who, though severely ill like Spring, could be kept alive for years by modern medicine.

Because Spring is mobile and able to talk, his case is not the same as the celebrated one involving Karen Ann Quinlan, the young New Jersey woman whose hopeless comatose state led her parents to ask that efforts to keep her alive cease. (Though doctors disconnected her respirator almost four years ago, after a ruling by the New Jersey Supreme Court, Quinlan, still in a coma, remains alive.) "This man is not a vegetable," insists Fred Mues, administrator of the Holyoke Geriatric Center, where Spring lives.

The first tough question the Massachusetts courts had to answer was who should decide what Spring would want were he competent to choose. The resulting yearlong legal wrangle ended a month ago when the supreme judicial court ruled that the decision was up to the probate court judge, not relatives or doctors.

With the case back in his hands, Franklin County Probate Court Judge Sanford Keedy concluded that the onetime avid outdoorsman would rather die than prolong a life devoted mostly to sleeping. The next day, Spring did not receive his regular dialysis treatment. His nurses were outraged. Two of them asked Spring if he wanted to die, and when he reportedly said no, they took the story to the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram. A Hartford, Conn., nurse and a Brookline, Mass., doctor, both affiliated with the right-to-life movement, then visited Spring and also emerged with a no to the same question. Do the responses reflect Spring's true feelings? Concedes Lawyer Mark I. Berson, the court-appointed guardian leading the legal fight to preserve Spring's life: "You can get a yes or no answer to any question, but that does not mean he understands the question." Nevertheless Berson appealed Keedy's decision, arguing that Spring might have regained a degree of competence, and Justice Quirico has agreed to a hearing. Meantime, the dialysis, Spring's life--and his family's agony--go on.

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