by Earl E. Appleby, Jr.

Choose life that you may live, an ancient Book of Life advises. For more and more Americans, however, that choice is being made by others. For more and more, that choice is being made not for life but for death, the undignified death of euthanasia. (To treat a man as a dog is not dignified.)

Those who have signed the misnamed "Living Will" have already chosen death, however, unknowingly. "The Will," as the Washington Post's B.D. Colen (no closet pro-lifer) writes, "would authorize the murder of virtually anyone who filled out a Will, lost consciousness for a period of time, and would in some way be incapacitated upon regaining consciousness."

In The National Law Journal, attorney Seymour Levine observes, "The living will is a written instrument by which an individual declares in advance what his wishes are regarding medical treatment if he is not capable of speaking for himself." "To reinforce the lesson that patients' wishes are to be heeded, many have signed living wills," Bowen Hosford, another lawyer, notes in Making Your Medical Decisions.

"Choice" is the banner of the euthanasia movement, as it is of others seeking to kill the unwanted and the inconvenient. But is it a flag whose colors are false?

Despite her clearly expressed but unwritten desire for treatment, Mrs. Wanglie is a prime euthanasia target and her danger of dying from medical murder is anything but abstract.

Mrs. Wanglie entered a coma while in a Minnesota hospital last May when medical staff failed to resuscitate her in time to prevent it. The following month the Hennepin County Medical Center began its campaign to pull the plug on the life of this 87 year-old daughter of a Lutheran minister, who believes, as does CURE, that "Only He Who gave life has the right to take it." It is time to say that even doctors who think they're God are not.

I regret Mrs. Wanglie did not have the opportunity to sign a Life Support Directive (as thousands have done). When a media that spends hours of airtime and pages of print to promote the "living will" will not spare a minute or a word reporting on its opposite, the Life Support Directive, it is not surprising. And when hospitals encourage staff to witness "living wills" but forbid them to witness the Life Support Directives the question of choice or con gains further urgency.

I've sat in courtrooms where the lives of those living in coma (as my Dad did from February, 1981 through September, 1990) were tossed on the human garbage heap on the hear-say "evidence" of casual acquaintances based on off-hand remarks that would have been judged ludicrous had something more valuable than human life, say property, been at stake.

But Helga's husband, Oliver, a retired attorney experienced in testimony, recounts that his wife of more than half a century expressly told him, "If anything happens to me, I want everything done."

Yet despite the clear evidence of Mrs. Wanglie and the consistent objections of Mr. Wanglie and of the couple's adult children, David and Ruth, doctors at Hennepin County Medical Center remain determined to continue their efforts to bring about her death. So much for "choice." So much for "patients' rights."

"Physicians have often believed they had exclusive responsibility for decision-making about life-prolonging treatment for incompetent patients," Hosford reminds us, concluding, "That belief is unjustified." It is particularly unjustified for doctors like Dr. Michael Belzer, Hennepin County's medical director, who claims a heartbeat no longer signifies life.

"Who are they to determine who's to die and who's to live?" Mr. Wanglie asks. "Who Lives? Who Dies? Who Decides?" inquires the AMA's American Medical News.

Helga Wanglie supplied the only valid answer when she told her husband, "Only He who gave life has the right to take life." If the answer is decreed by a lesser judge in Minneapolis or Washington neither her life nor yours will be safe.