The Death Bureaucracy Begins in Washington State
It is sickening to read the proposed bureaucratic forms that patients and their death doctors will fill out and send to the state when planning assisted suicides. Twenty years ago, people would have called me a total paranoid if I predicted this is what we would become. I wouldn't have believed it myself. Nonetheless, this is where we are as a culture. From the Proposed Rule Making document filed by the now ironically misnamed Department of Health:
Even the name of the form is propaganda. The death culture, or a death cult?REQUEST FOR MEDICATION
TO END MY LIFE IN A HUMANE AND DIGNIFIED MANNER
I, ______________________________________________________________________, am an adult of sound mind.
First Middle Last
I am suffering from _____________________________________, which my attending physician has determined is an incurable, irreversible terminal disease and which has been medically confirmed by a consulting physician.
I have been fully informed of my diagnosis, prognosis, the nature of medication to be prescribed and potential associated risks, the expected result, and feasible alternatives, including comfort care, hospice care, and pain control.
I request that my attending physician prescribe medication that I may self-administer to end my life in a humane and dignified manner and dispense or to contact a pharmacist to dispense the prescription.Initial One
I have informed my family of my decision and taken their opinions into consideration.
I have decided not to inform my family of my decision.
I have no family to inform of my decision.I understand that I have the right to rescind this request at any time.
I understand the full import of this request and I expect to die when I take the medication to be prescribed. I further understand that although most deaths occur within three hours, my death may take longer and my physician has counseled me about this possibility.
I make this request voluntarily and without reservation; and I accept full moral responsibility for my actions.Signature: County of Residence: Date:
Labels: Assisted Suicide. Washington State. Bureaucratic Forms.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 12:59 PM
18 Comments
18 Comments:
"Voluntarily"? Whose idea was it in the first place?
I'm surprised the person isn't expected to take full moral responsibility on behalf of everyone else involved.
"Request?"
One doctor who happens to be attending can "determine" the person is incurable. Very nice. I've never understood how people accept "the doctors only give x time to live," "surprised the doctors," etc. Since when are doctors omniscient? When and why did society give them the credibility they have that's more than anyone deserves?
What if the person changes his or her mind when they are too weak to "rescind" but still want to live?
They're incurable, but they can still read and write and comprehend and sign their name. A bit proleptic if you ask me.
This is nothing but obvious outright desire to get rid of people. Tell someone they're incurable, they're going to be depressed, and in no condition to make a decision, let alone one that is only God's to make. This is institutionalized murder. It's sickening.
The potential for abuse has to be the deciding factor in whether such a document/"protocol" should exist.
Doctors can't be or remain doctors if they are willing to participate in anything like this.
I literally feel sick to my stomach from this.
I had a nightmare about it.
The role of the physician determining that a disease is incurable and terminal is nothing new. A physician must do this for a patient to go onto hospice. However, it is new when the result is that the patient feels secure in killing him/herself.
What really bugs me is that this form implies that one cannot die a humane, dignified death any other way.
Heather-good point. It also reaks of our culture's fear of and rejection of aging and death as physical processes. Our society doesn't want to deal with anything "gross" like helping certain individuals go to the bathroom, and such people are expected to drop dead when their existence results in such needs. "Dignity" is being misused as a synonym for "socially undesirable"-a dignified death is regarded as something that lets people skip the "undignified" aspects of the dying process.
SAFEpres: I've seen the nightmare happen, in terms of euthanasia.
I never liked the concept of hospice in the first place. It's PART of the death culture and legitimizes it. I'd like to take that Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and shake her. The way to correct what (at least according to the little I've read -- who wants to read about dying? Dwelling on death and "end of life" helps give rise to and legitimize he death culture) she saw that was wrong in hospitals was NOT to make an institution out of "end of life." Life could end at any moment. A person dies when it's their time. Making an institution of "end-of-life," "hospice," etc. opens the door to the rest of the malarkey. It was to FIX HOSPITALS. She was a damned Swiss with head problems on top of everything else. Now look what we've got.
Similarly if a doctor "has" to "declare" a person "incurable" in order to "get into" hospice, the door is open to declaring people incurable, period. That is not a doctor's or anyone else's right to say; it's God's. Doctor is supposed to do best for patient while alive, not even be expected to "say when."
How many times have we heard or read "surprised the doctors"? That's just part of their arrogance and our stupidity in feeding and putting up with it. "Pleased the doctors" would be a little better. Do we ever hear that the doctors were happy? No, just surprised. Because somewhere along the line we gave them the authority to say whether we are going to live or die. Who are they, anyway? They're trained to consider life a terminal disease, and it's not much of a jump from there to the point where they feel entitled to say when it's terminating, and then to where they can terminate it. Hospice? FEH! I just hope I die alone. The last thing a person needs is people butting in on the end of one's life in any fashion.
Heather: That's right -- they're going to cause death, AND define when it's humane? Well, what we do to other animals, we eventually do to ourselves. If they call it humane, they have an excuse to cause it.
Right Heather, and welcome. And in Montana, a judge elevated propagandist language into a principle of state constitutional law!
A snowball from H-e-double-toothpicks running a million miles an hour downhill.....
"I am an adult of sound mind".. From the Queen of Masking for purposes of survival out in everyday public venues, that statement holds absolutely no weight.. Actually, there are no words coming to Mind to express precisely how empty that statement can be, especially if one was incidentally riding the wrong [cusp] of one's cycle as one was signing off on Life itself..
"I am suffering" == downtrodden victim-based verbiage.. Way to continue to carry forth with the ages old, Labor Day pity party eluding, negative image-inducing stereotype, Washington..
else-if.. Started to comment this near sounded like computer programming code, there at the "Initial One" part where you notch off down to "I have no family to inform".. But then.. Computers don't (yet..?) have the capacity to knowingly falsify as they work their way through lines of code.. Human beings could, and some number of them inevitably will, say they have their family's blessings whether they do or not..
Would that it was a more compassionate World where initialing the last one about having no family to inform led immediately to Door, the First, labeled "Community Support"..
Would that initialing ANY of the statements of disclosure miraculously led through that same threshhold...
"I further understand that although most deaths occur within three hours, my death may take longer".....
I worked in a vet's clinic when I first moved to Georgia.. It rarely occurred, but we did have to euthanise a couple of animals.. Five minutes, maybe, it took.. Just think what it must be like to lay there in the wonder that is Human consciousness for three hours or "longer" knowing what one has just (irrevocably) done..
:sigh:
Cyber hugs from a nippy North Georgia..
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Ianthe -
I don't mind hospices in themselves, since in many cases they are more concerned with helping people to enjoy life, not promote death. It depends on who's running it and what the person's or people's philosphy is. Also, pre-natal hospice is very useful for parents who have lost or are going to lose an unborn/newborn child, in that it gives them care that many hospitals don't. In hospitals, doctors don't always treat a woman who loses or is going to lose her baby like she's suffering a death. They treat her like she should just get an abortion and be done with it, and try again later.
As I said, it depends on the hospice. The hospice I helped out at took care of my old manager's 9-year-old granddaughter, who died of brain cancer. Half-killed everyone at my job. The hospice was a Godsend and took good care of Haley and her family. But I know you aren't wrong. There are hospices that aren't much better than hospitals that encourage euthanasia.
Isn't it ironic that the form talks about 'moral responsibility' (the last sentence)?
T.E. What I don't like about hospice is that it is an institution. Once it became established as that -- at the same time as the death culture was starting to take hold -- it separated death from life, as if death were not part of the mainstream of life, and the more mainstream hospice became, the more it fed the death culture, and the more it enabled the medical establishment to treat -- and foist upon people -- the idea of dying as something that can be controlled, and that it can control. The economic side of the medical establishment, which now dominates it, was able to incorporate "hospice," as it has everything else. Social workers, and don't start me on them, and the way they have overrun hospitals, among other things, which have allowed it, now try to push people who aren't even dying into "hospice," just as into nursing homes, which are another institution to which people who consider their own lives and careers too important to "interrupt" by caring for the elderly. Cost and profit run the whole thing. What Elizabeth Kubler-Ross purported to be trying to fix was something that was wrong with hospitals and medical care, and those problems only have gotten worse because they were not addressed. As you once rightly pointed out, dying used to be a natural process that was part of life and occurred at home. Separating it into the "hospice" category is like separating the elderly from society, with similar dehumanizing and death-culture-promoting results. Making "end of life" a named category is very destructive and I'm nauseated every time I hear "end of life," which includes not only hospice, but "living wills," "removal from life support," "palliative care," "assisted suicide," and outright euthanasia. A person is alive right up until the moment they die, and anything that seeks to take control of the end of life and categorize it and institutionalize it is danger and part of why we've ended up with a death culture. Life isn't easy, and it isn't supposed to be. The "soft," "nice" approach is what's GIVEN us the death culture. If we care about "quality of life," we should be concentrating on getting rid of the marmalukes who have overrun the medical establishment and its concommitant industries, and insist that doctors and hospitals be ethical and competent and work harder to do their jobs right.
That should have been, "to which those who consider their own "lives" (it's obscene to talk about "one's life" just as it is to talk about money, and people do both all the time now)and "careers" too important to care for the elderly have delegated that too-much-work task." Or words to that effect. But no, the social workers, who should be at home caring for their own families, have "careers" that are too important, just as the doctors do, and everyone has to live -- and die -- the way THEY want them to. Hospitals, and the whole health care industry has been ruined by too many useless females and some useless men, too, who "want to help people" and are in the job market and have found employment in hospitals, insurance companies, "institutions," "social services," etc. When it wzs nuns, things ran right they knew who they were and everyone else did, too. Now, the same people don't want the burdens of donning the habit, and don't have the sense ethics that went along with the habit, either, and are out in the mainstream of society, along with the slew of divorced women who got real estate licenses. Then we wonder why society is in the state it's in and why the "inconvenient" are euthanized. People didn't want to be bothered with their elderly, and put them in nursing homes; people don't want to work in nursing homes, or be there; "hospice" sounds much better and more important, and what goes on re hospice often doesn't fit the "image." But even when hospice is done right, it's still part of the death culture and part of this whole overriding institution of do-gooders needing jobs and giving hospitals and families an excuse not to do their jobs properly, and the business side of the medicine finding another way to profit, as people lose, because they were willing to give it up, because they don't want to be bothered, more and more control over their own lives and those of their loved ones. But "hospice" sounds "nice," and whether it turns out to be or not in a given place, it's part of the death culture that uses "quality of life" and "end of life" as shibboleths.
And as propaganda.
And it's not just hospitals, the health care industry, nursing homes, hospices, social workers, etc. It's the whole nanny-government, social service, etc. ethic. It's psychology, sociology, "counselling," family courts, judges, etc. The law has been poisoned with it. Elder law, estate law, family law, matrimonial law, courts; society is overrun with it. The only lawyers left in the whole scenario who have a clean unencumbered job that is able to do some real good to address the situation without being dragged down into the muck and mire of it are medical malpractice lawyers on the plaintiffs' side, and of course society, which doesn't even know which end is up any more, gives them a hard time when it should be on its knees thanking them as they are its last hope in this whole mess as things now stand.
Well, I think it makes it perfectly clear what a person's intentions are. Perhaps the reason so many in the life-at-all-costs crowd are ridiculing it is that it gives the lie to the scenario in which poor old Auny Sally is "forced" to kill herself so that her greedy nephew can inherit the paint-by-numbers picture of Elvis.
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