It strikes me that, just as advances in medical technology   have made it possible for premature infants to survive outside their mother's womb at ages far earlier than they might have done some years ago; the same is true for the survival of elderly or terribly ill people who can now be kept alive via various life support systems. But the quality of that life may not be a very good one. We may be able to keep someone alive longer, but should we?

Fetuses or preemies can't speak and therefore can't offer an opinion on the matter; but we can and should ask our loved ones if they would prefer to be kept alive by heroic mesaures of life support technology, should it come to that.

Medical technology also allows us to know when a child will be born with severe birth defects. (Meaning, in some cases, without a brain stem,in which case immediately after birth the child will begin to deteriorate and die. Recent legal questions surround this rare but not unknown phenomenon; should the babies be brought to term so their healthy organs may be harvested to help other infants? Should these children be brought to term? Right to lifers don't even want stem cell research to happen, so you can imagine what they say to this.

Our culture has a profoundly troublesome relationship with death. It is also true that people are far more likely to sue for malpractice when something goes wrong in the hospital. A few decades back, it was accepted that mistakes were sometimes made. Better and more complex technology, not to mention a crowded and increasingly incompetent health care system, have created greater possibilities of error alongside this greater tendency to be litigious about the fate of our loved ones.