11 posts tagged “doctor assisted suicide”

A one year old boy, who could have a tracheotomy, be taken home from the hospital and live his life, may have his ventilator removed at the wishes of his mother and the HOSPITAL TRUST PAYING FOR HIS CARE, because his severe physical disability has been deemed 'intolerable suffering'. His father disagrees and is fighting for his son's life.

'Quality of life'.  Brothers and sisters, can we think about that phrase for a moment?  Can we think about what we are saying when we are using it?  Can we, as Christians, really use that phrase?

Montana judge: Man has right to assisted suicide

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — A Montana judge has ruled that doctor-assisted suicides are legal in the state, a decision likely to be appealed as the state argues that the Legislature, not the court, should decide whether terminally ill patients have the right to take their own life.

Judge Dorothy McCarter issued the ruling late Friday in the case of a Billings man with terminal cancer, who had sued the state with four physicians that treat terminally ill patients and anonprofit patients' rights group.

"The Montana constitutional rights of individual privacy and human dignity, taken together, encompass the right of a competent terminally (ill) patient to die with dignity," McCarter said in the ruling.

It also said that those patients had the right to obtain self-administered medications to hasten death if they find their suffering to be unbearable, and that physicians can prescribe such medication without fear of prosecution.

"The patient's right to die with dignity includes protection of the patient's physician from liability under the state's homicide statutes," the judge wrote.

Attorney General Mike McGrath said Saturday that attorneys in his office would discuss the ruling next week and expected the state will appeal the ruling...

...The state attorney general's office had argued that intentionally taking a life was illegal, and that the issue was the responsibility of the state Legislature.

Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Anders had argued the state has no evaluation process, safeguards or regulations to provide guidance or oversight for doctor-assisted suicide. The state also said it was premature to declare constitutional rights for a competent, terminally ill patient because the terms "competent" or "terminally ill" had yet to be defined.

The ruling noted that doctors are often asked to "determine the competency of their patients for the purposes of guardianship and other legal proceedings."

"Whether a patient is terminally ill can also be determined by the physician as an integral component of the physician-patient relationship," McCarter wrote.

McCarter's ruling makes Montana the third state after Oregon and Washington to allow doctor-assisted suicides. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1997 that terminally ill patients have no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide but did nothing to prevent states from legalizing the process.

So, apparently, a judge can go a make a decision like this all by herself... How? It's unbelievable.

The Media's Love for Suicide Outlaws

On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, Wesley J. Smith takes a look at the media’s fawning treatment of suicide advocates. What does a reporter see when he visits the home of a suicide facilitator? Strangely and sadly, he often sees a hero.

Listen in as bioethicist Wesley J. Smith shows how journalism has become a prime mover in the culture of death, to the point that its terminal nonjudgmentalism cannot be trusted.

What We Are Becoming With the Culture of Death

On this episode of What It Means to Be Human, bioethicist and Discovery Institute senior fellow Wesley J. Smith takes a look at our culture’s "terminal nonjudgmentalism." How far have we come as a society when we lose the will to save suicidal people's lives? Smith examines two outrageous cases from the UK,
one where doctors refused to save a dying girl and another where a disabled man’s parents helped took him to Switzerland to commit suicide. What does the advocacy of death culture turn us into? Tune in and find out.

In this episode, Smith quotes a study that says after 5 years, the depression of those who've acquired a severe disability later in life levels to the same as those without disabilities. Something to think about STRONGLY when it comes to the debate over assisted suicide

A campaign has launched in oppositon to assisted suicide. If you oppose assisted suicide, take the pledge as either a physician, medical caregiver, or concerned citizen not to participate in this practice. Please feel free to come back here and tell me about it.

A glimmer of hope

From SpokesmanReview.com:

Medical providers say they won't assist with suicides

While Washington voters made it legal for doctors to help terminally ill residents end their lives, opponents of the assisted suicide measure indicated Wednesday they will continue to resist the practice.

Initiative 1000 won with strong support Tuesday, but doctors don't have to help their patients make that final act, says the Washington State Medical Association.
Furthermore, Eastern Washington's largest hospital system, Providence Health and Services, will forbid physicians from helping patients die at its hospitals, nursing homes and assisted care centers.

"Providence will not support physician-assisted suicide within its ministries," the owner of Sacred Heart Medical Center and Holy Family Hospital said in a prepared statement. "This position is grounded in our basic values of respect for the sacredness of life, compassionate care of dying and vulnerable persons, and respect for the integrity of medical, nursing and allied health professions. We do not believe health care providers should ever be put in a position of aiding a patient in taking his or her own life."

The new Washington law is set to take effect in July 2009 after state regulators write rules to guide the practice.

Read the rest of the article here.

No, not really.  More on Washington's assisted suicide initiative.  But, gay rights seem to capture more attention.

From Fox News:

"No person who is suffering is a problem to be solved.  They're a person to be loved."  -Rev Paul R. Smith

I-1000 is a proposed initiative to legalize physician assisted suicide in the state of Washington.

Assisted suicide.  It would be hard to argue with the fact that anyone receiving the news that s/he had a terminal illness would be depressed.  One cannot deny that depression would play a major role in one's choice to commit suicide.  When doctors begin setting a precedent of assisted depressed people in committing suicide, can you imagine the consequences for depressed people everywhere?

Looking at assisted suicide, we can see how such a legalized action would create a feeling of a duty to die for those with illnesses, as well as the feeling by the rest of us that those with terminal illnesses have a duty to die.  In Oregon's first years with legalized physician assisted suicide, a large number of people who committed suicide did so out of fear of becoming a burden to their family.  With limited financial resources, or at least claims of limited financial resources, the rest of us might indeed feel that those who were 'dying anyway' had a duty to die, especially if the person is old or poor or has a severe cognitive disability.  The kind of people who have 'used their share' of public or private health care, the kind of people we deem to have a 'low quality of life', after all. 

Another factor in a person choosing suicide is a fear of disability.  In the first two years of Oregon's assisted suicide law, those who committed suicide did so out of fear of being unable to pursue enjoyable life activities, fear of needing personal assistance with daily living, and worries about being a burden on their families.  Disability Rights activist Paul Longmore spoke about this aspect of Oregon's experience:

Fear of disability typically underlies assisted suicide... The advocates play on that horror of "dependency." ...If needing help is undignified and death is better than dependency, there is no reason to deny assisted suicide to people who will have to put up with it for six or sixteen years, rather than just six months.  Not that we favor assisted suicide if it is limited to terminally ill people.  We simply want to ask, has this country gotten to the point that we will abet suicide because people can't wipe their own behinds?

Lastly, physician assisted suicide will lead to euthanasia.  After all, what about those with disabilities who can't take their lethal prescription on their own?  Isn't that discrimination?  They'll need someone to feed the pills to them.  Once we become accustomed to the idea of physicians practicing death, we will begin to tolerate more extreme versions, more extreme that a doctor 'simply' assisting a person who is dying, more than a physician who is providing a 'good death' to people who can't do it themselves.  How far could this go?

From the Coalation Against Assisted Suicide's website:

"Pressure for improved palliative care appears to have evaporated [in the Netherlands]," according to Herbert Hendin, M.D. Dr. Hendin is a Director of Suicide Prevention International and was formerly the Medical Director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

"Over the past two decades," Hendin continued, "the Netherlands has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia for the terminally ill to euthanasia for the chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for psychological distress and from voluntary euthanasia to nonvoluntary and involuntary euthanasia.

"Once the Dutch accepted assisted suicide it was not possible legally or morally to deny more active medical (assistance to die), i.e. euthanasia, to those who could not effect their own deaths. Nor could they deny assisted suicide or euthanasia to the chronically ill who have longer to suffer than the terminally ill or to those who have psychological pain not associated with physical disease. To do so would be a form of discrimination.

Involuntary euthanasia has been justified as necessitated by the need to make decisions for patients not [medically] competent to choose for themselves."

Doctors can help people in severe pain due to a terminal illness with palliative care.  The rest of can meet the need of someone alone with the fear of being abandoned in their illness, in their fear of being a 'burden'.  Though we don't do it well, right now.  How else could something like physician assisted suicide gain so much popularity?

There are other options besides sanctioning the suicide of people dying.

For more information, visit the Coalition Against Assisted Suicide at www.noassistedsuicide.com .