This Blog considers assisted suicide/euthanasia, bioethics, human cloning, biotechnology, radical environmentalism, and the dangers of animal rights/liberation. My views expressed here, as in my books and other writings, reflect my understanding that the philosophy of human exceptionalism is the bedrock of universal human rights. Or, to put it another way: human life matters. (The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of any organization with which I am affiliated.)
The woman in the UK who was ordered to receive a sleeping medication to see if she would awaken, didn't. The UK courts have now allowed her family remove all life support, which I presume includes tube-supplied sustenance. Alas.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:22 PM
6 Comments
I am a Senior Fellow in Human Rights and Bioethics at the Discovery Institute and the author of 12 books, including A Rat Is A Pig Is A Dog Is A Boy, which is relevant to the issues considered by this blog.
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6 Comments:
I was afraid this would happen, as the comments on the other thread will show. It sounded as though the judge wasn't taking any sort of stance against dehydrating this non-dying person to death, just like he wanted to try some other way to get her to have a better "quality of life." It seemed plausible that the idea was that PVS people have no right not to be dehydrated to death, but, hey, if her "vegetative state" could turn out not to be permanent, _then_ we wouldn't dehydrate her to death. When that didn't work, the food and fluids get pulled. So now she'll die in 10 days to two weeks.
(I just had a long thread discussion on a different pro-life blog where the woman running the blog argued that dehydrating people to death is rare because such cases make it into the news. This did not seem to me to be obviously correct.)
No, dehydrating cognitively disabled people is extremely common--conscious and unconscious. It only makes news when family members object.
One further point: The USA led the world in this area of bioethics. We have been dehydrating people since Cruzan, circa 1990. The UK came along in this regard much more slowly, so I don't know how common it is there. Australia only went this route more recently. I am not sure about most other countries.
If they're so friggin' hell-bent on killing the woman, shouldn't they at least make sure "her body" doesn't experience pain? Make sure she's hooked up to, say, morphine and other painkillers? Whether they believe she's alive or not, her body will still respond to pain.
We keep breeding better idiots.
T.E., they probably will. They did with Terri Schiavo. After all the talk about what a wonderful, peaceful way dehydration was to die and how she was totally unable to feel anything anyway, should be thought of as "dead" and all the rest of the nonsense, they had a whole protocol for giving her morphine as the horrible process went on.
To me, this almost makes it worse. Not that I think they shouldn't give pain-killer, but that I think it shows a deliberateness to the whole process that belies the claim that it is "letting the person die naturally." First they take a person who isn't in pain, deny fluids, then because of the fact that this will probably cause pain, give pain-killer.
In the case of otherwise conscious people (e.g. stroke victims and the elderly), the increasing pain medication and Atavin (an anti-anxiety drug) also prevent unpleasant incidents in which the person begs for water. They just drug the heck out of them so they can't say they want something different. I believe eventually this is what was done to Marjorie Nighbert, whom Wesley has written about.
Lydia -
You're right, it is worse. It's a thousand times worse. They effin' know that they're hurting this person, who supposedly is a non-person, and they're still murdering her outright. That ain't cool. Totally bogus. They're sugar-coating murder by making it sound like it was inevitable, then intentionally starving someone to death.
I can understand a person who, in the very last stages of life, refuses food or water because the body is shutting down and the processes for handling food and drink are no longer there. That's acceptable - these people generally don't feel any pain from starvation because they die of whatever's killing them before pain has time to set in. But killing people who aren't in those last stages is like denying a healthy 12-year-old food and water, and then cooing about how natural this all is, while doping her up becasue deep down they know better.
I wish they'd try this on the mother of some famous politician. Not effin likely.
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