- © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
I was interested in Ken Walker's article1 as I had just read a discussion of the happiness of conjoined twins in a new book by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.2 Gilbert comments on twins Lori and Reba Schappel, who are joined at the forehead and share a blood supply, part of a skull and some brain tissue. The twins feel that, even were it possible, they would reject surgery to separate them. Gilbert writes, “So here's the question: If this were your life rather than theirs, how would you feel? If you said, ‚joyful, playful and optimistic,' … try to be honest instead of correct. The honest answer is ‚despondent, desperate and depressed.' Indeed, it seems clear that no right-minded person could really be happy under such circumstances … in an exhaustive search of the medical literature, [a] medical historian found the ‚desire to remain together to be so widespread among communicating conjoined twins as to be practically universal.'” In sum, writes Gilbert, “all claims of happiness are claims from someone's point of view — from the perspective of a single human being whose unique collection of past experiences serves as a context, a lens, a background for her evaluation of her current experience. As much as the scientist might wish for it, there isn't a view from nowhere.”
Walker suggests that our concerns about the conjoined twins recently born in British Columbia should be primarily financial in nature. I am moved to quote Kurt Vonnegut, who wrote (in Breakfast of Champions) that a life not worth living combined with an unquenchable will to live is a combination often seen on this planet.
I am glad that Walker is not my doctor, and that he does not have the power to decide who should and who should not be born. Or have that bypass, appendectomy, arthroscopic knee surgery, etc.
After all, we will all end up as worm feed. Timing is, of course, everything.
Footnotes
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Competing interests: None declared.