National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization Reiterates Opposition to Assisted Suicide
The nation's leading hospice professional organization, the NHPCO, has reiterated its opposition to the legalization of assisted suicide. Good. Assisted suicide is directly contrary to the hospice philosophy. Indeed, as the statement notes, it constitutes (often unintentional) abandonment. For the full resolution, follow this link.
Labels: Hospice. Assisted Suicide
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 10:30 AM
15 Comments
15 Comments:
Wesley, I'm curious. If a patient explicitly stated that they didn't want counselling for 'depression', would you use that as a reason to assume that they were depressed, and proceed with counselling anyway?
Assuming this is in a hospice context: One can hardly counsel someone who doesn't want it. I would keep offering it, however. And certainly not permit PAS.
At least you're willing to respect patients to that extent. But some would question your motives that guide you towards opposing PAS. Are you in fact 'looking after them' to look compassionate?
Because some people have cited this as a reason for opposing PAS, yourself included. Why do people have a 'duty to live' just so that others can be compassionate to them? Such an attitude callously treats people as means rather than as ends in themselves.
I respect patients to every extent, but some acts should not be countenanced. People don't have a duty to live, in the sense I think you are using that term. I fully support, for example, the right to refuse medical treatment. I have been a hospice volunteer sitting with dying people and their families, helping them in ways that I could. The hospice philosophy is not a duty to live but an attempt to make what remains of life as quality filled and comfortable as possible, while not using any means necessary to maintain life.
What patients don't have the right to is to have others participate in their destruction. That is a corruption of medicine and an abandonment--not only of the patient who is killed, but of others who look on and see that their lives are deemed not worth protecting.
Granting patients the right to refuse treatment but denying them the right to assisted suicide is discriminatory and hypocritical.
It allows some quadraplegics to access PAS by having their respirator removed, but not others. And that's just the beginning. Elderly patients who come down with pneumonia can die sooner by refusing antibiotics, but others cannot. The list goes on and on.
Read Vacco v. Quill, the U.S. Supreme Court disagreed with you 9-0. I also write about that at length in FORCED EXIT, if you are interested.
At least one judge in the UK felt that the 'acts and omissions' doctrine was 'morally and intellectually dubious', 'illogical' and 'hypocritical' (Anthony Bland)
The doctrine essentially says that anything other than a lethal injection is OK, so perhaps patients should be allowed to dehydrate themselves in a sauna while having blood drained out of them to further hasten death.
Vacco was a plurality. I think there were 4 different opinions, hence 4 different reasons, some of which rehashing just plain tradition.
i.e., all 9 justices did not fully agree with Wesley.
But - a Circuit Court did agree with Tony.
Royale: Please. All nine agreed that refusing medical treatment, which is a right, is not the same as assisted suicide, and that New York's outlawing assisted suicide was not an infringement of equal protection. That is 9-0, even though there were different rationales expressed by some.
Or to put it another way, the District Court's ruling was unanimously and unequivocally overturned.
I believed the plurality opinion spent pages and pages discussing how in traditional law, unwanted medical treatment would have been a battery, and that seemed to be basis on why they are different.
Ho hum. Quite a lame argument, IMO.
Thanks, Royale. The SC's reasoning is flawed if you look at it objectively.
Consciously refusing a respirator or a feeding tube is suicide. The aim is death, the intention is death, and the result is death. Often the patient has to be assisted because they aren't physically capable of removing or unplugging the respirator on their own.
Oh, nonsense. NOBODY has the "right" to have somebody else kill them. How different is that from good old-fashioned murder?
If you want to off yourself, nobody is stopping you from your "right." But don't ask anyody else, especially a doctor who takes an oath to SAVE lives, to do your dirty work for you.
Tony, yes! There is a huge gray area in between LST and PAS.
On one hand, we have people who tell an EMT and say "no".
In the middle, we have people in the middle of treatment want it discontinued. Thus, by stopping or continuing, requires an action by another.
A little over from there, we have people who want to be injected with something arguably medically important, but could kill them, say a morphine overdose.
On the far end, we have people who want to be injected with say, cyanide.
I find the whole thing very gray and our current lines as espoused by the SCOTUS don't fit the medical realities. So, to focus on traditional definitions of battery...well, that misses the whole point.
I couldn't agree more, Royale. And dying patients frequently experience existential suffering that can *only* be relieved through terminal sedation. And most people would say, 'What's the point? Why can't I just get it all over with at once?'
Now it's illegal to get injected with the pneumonia bacteria, because it's quite common towards the end of life, deliberate infection is difficult to prove.
Susan - consent is key. If consent is irrelevant, we have ridiculous situations such as husbands being allowed to rape and own their wives, among other things. Do you see the difference between maliciously killing someone for their money, or helping someone die out of respect for their wishes, compassion and mercy?
Tony, it's a myth that pain control kills. Wesley posted about it in January. Search for "pain" on this site -- it's the first hit.
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