It's between you and your maker

I loved that little chirping chick, all downy yellow, pecking away in his box. I'd rub the chick against my cheek, hold it and give it a love squeeze. Maybe a little too hard, because sometimes it would try to squirm out of my grasp.
Until the day that it jumped and landed on the floor head first. It started convulsing, chirping wildly, and then its little eyes closed and it lay perfectly still.
It couldn't be dead, I prayed. No, no, and no. In search of a miracle, my 7-year-old brain came up with a plan. I would put the chick in a pan on the stove, over low heat. Just like a premature baby in an incubator. The chick started to move erratically. I was pleased with my quick thinking, but once out of the pan it was clear there was no life to it.
That was my first experience with death.
I've never told anyone what happened -- well, except a priest. It was the first sin I listed in my first confession. I was a murderer. And a liar -- I had told my mom that I had found the chick dead in its box.
It's an odd thing to share, I know, but it illustrates just how primal maternal instincts can be. Or for that matter, paternal instincts -- from the first cave man who swung his club at a wild animal to protect his young.
There's another lesson in my sorry tale of that little chick who lived only a few weeks. It may help explain why I remain so conflicted about what to do when people are terminally ill. At my core, I'm always praying for a miracle. I'm not alone in wondering just how far society should allow people to "choose" death with dignity. Millions of other Americans struggle with what is ethical, moral and just in fashioning laws that give people the "right" to die.
A living will is an easy call. If I'm brain dead or can't breathe on my own, don't hook me up to machines, thank-you-very-much. Using science to prolong "life" that can't think or feel is anathema to life itself.
What if it's your child whose brain no longer functions past involuntary twitches? How many parents have faced such a terrifying choice? Some parents of adult children, like Terri Schiavo's, refuse to give up.
As agonizing as those decisions are, though, there's a certain spiritual satisfaction in letting a loved one who's suffering, or simply not feeling anything, go to a better place. That's the other side of the wrenching Schiavo drama.
What if you are terminally ill and your doctors have given you six months to live? Should you, being of sound mind and broken body, have the right to get your doctor to prescribe lethal doses of drugs to die?
Death with dignity
Oregon's Death With Dignity Act allows what some believe to be state-sanctioned suicide. Why should it matter to you or me what other people want to do about their own bodies? Grab a gun or rat poisoning. Skip the middle man.
Except. We want to die peacefully. Most of us want to make the call about our quality of life when ill, so help us God. And good doctors already help horribly ill patients die every day. Just a bit more morphine not only eases the pain but eventually weakens the heart until it gives out.
One man's suicide can be another's death with dignity, can't it?
That's the fundamental question the U.S. Supreme Court will decide in the Oregon case, though it need not go so far. It only has to address the legal issue of whether the federal government's Controlled Substances Act can usurp Oregon's 1997 law. The Bush administration argues that Oregon's doctors can't use medications meant under the federal law for a "legitimate medical purpose" to help patients die -- no matter what Oregon's carefully crafted law says about compassion for the dying.
To me, Oregon's law is narrowly tailored for extremely ill people and doesn't cross over the ethical line to assisted suicide for people not as gravely ill. As it stands, only 171 patients have opted for it since 1997. And it should be their choice.
Yet with his intervention in Oregon, President Bush wants to put his own spiritual imprint on medical care, deciding how we should die. We have souls to save, he implies, and suicide is a ticket to hell.
If choosing death with dignity is a sin, let that be between me and my maker -- you and yours. Government shouldn't play God.
X Myriam Marquez is an editorial page columnist for the Orlando Sentinel. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune.