Bradford William Short : Did physicians or family caregivers play a causal role in the deaths of Adams and Jefferson?
Many bioethicists are striving to create a grim future for America, one in which such outrages as infanticide are tolerated. But disfiguring the future isn't enough for some of them. They're doing the same thing to the past.
Pro-assisted-suicide bioethicists have time and again made false and often preposterous claims about the history of suicide and assisted suicide in Western (and especially Anglo-American) thought. Further evidence of this fiction can be found in the just published Ending Life: Ethics and the Way We Die, written by the influential University of Utah bioethicist Margaret Pabst Battin. (She was one of the signatories to the bioethicists' March 2004 letter protesting President Bush's appointment of new members to the Kass Commission.) In this book, Battin advances arguments in favor of legalizing and legitimating assisted suicide. One of them is that John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who uncannily both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826, may have both deliberately killed themselves.
Battin has a chapter in which she complains that while "practically every schoolchild" learns "the fact that Adams and Jefferson died the same day," "asking why" is not encouraged. The answer cannot be that it was a coincidence, as the schoolchildren are taught:
[T]he fact that the death dates for both Adams and Jefferson fell on a historic anniversary — the fiftieth anniversary, not the forty-ninth or fifty-first — may seem to stretch beyond the point of sheer plausibility the claim that this was mere coincidence. But when appeals to coincidence are insufficient, we must look for explanations in common circumstance or common cause, or for causation from one case to the other.
Actually, it is extremely plausible that among the hundreds of great Americans in our history, there would be at least one coincidence involving two of them that, looked at in isolation, appears highly improbable. But Battin still drives on, and looks for that "causation." She slanders the memory of the two physicians who attended to the two dying former presidents when she insincerely "asks" the following question: "Did physicians or family caregivers play a causal role in the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, deliberately allowing or helping them to die?" Pretty soon Battin has our fifth president, James Monroe — who also died on the Fourth, but of a different year — in on the suicidal fun, along with people to whom both Jefferson and Adams wrote letters in the early 1800s, and even Adams's horse:
Furthermore, the issue of synchrony — whatever the individual explanations for their deaths — also leaves us with the further question of coordination. Did Adams and Jefferson think alike but act independently? Could they have had some joint understanding, reached perhaps in 1813 — when each had been corresponding with a physician, Adams with Benjamin Rush about a horse's deliberate stumble and Jefferson with Samuel Brown about lethal drugs — that they then recalled later on? Did their physicians or families think alike but act independently, or perhaps in concert? Could their families and caregivers have lied about the precise dates of their deaths, seeking to lend their demises a greater grandeur? Or was there a more orchestrated plan here, known only to these two men, or to their physicians and families, that accounts for the extraordinary "coincidence" or "grand design" of their deaths? Could it have been the mode, so to speak, to die on the Fourth if at all possible, by whatever means? After all, not just Adams and Jefferson, but three of the first five presidents of the young United States died on the 4th of July. In 1831, just five years after the deaths of Adams and Jefferson, James Monroe, the fifth president, did so as well (emphasis in original).You half-expect her to start talking about the numerological significance of the number five, à la Farrakhan.