Non Cooperation in Assisted Suicide Spreads to Montana
When I have time, I intend to list the hospitals and institutions that have said no to assisted suicide in Washington. Now, apparently the same spirit of non cooperation with being complicit in assisted suicide that sprang to life in that state in the wake of the passage of I-1000 has spread to Montana, where a judge imposed assisted suicide as a constitutional right. From the story:
Four months after a District Court judge ruled that physician-assisted suicide is a right protected under the state's constitution, terminally ill patients say they're having trouble finding physicians willing to prescribe drugs that would hasten their deaths.I am sorry, nobody has the right to force doctors to have a patient's blood on their hands. The woman has the right to medical care, palliation, and support of her community--and I hope she receives it. With proper care, she can be almost assured a peaceful passing. But while it is certainly true that she may have the right to ask for a lethal prescription--she doesn't have the right to receive it--at least not yet. Meanwhile, not a word about suicide prevention in the story from the "compassionate" representatives of Compassion and Choices.
Denver-based advocacy group Compassion & Choices held a conference call Friday to read a statement from a 67-year-old Missoula woman who is dying of ovarian cancer. "I feel as though my doctors do not feel able to respect my decision to choose aid in dying," Janet Murdock said. "Access to physician aid in dying would restore my hope for a peaceful, dignified death in keeping with my values and beliefs."
This case aside, apparently the Montana Medical Association, of which I have been very critical, has changed course. Where the leader of the group once said the MMA had "bigger fish to fry" than worry about assisted suicide--now with a different president--it seems to understand that assisted suicide is a lunker when it comes to the destruction of medical ethics:
After District Judge Dorothy McCarter's December ruling, the Montana Medical Association adopted a policy that states the group: "does not condone the deliberate act of precipitating the death of a patient."This is excellent. Because something is legal--in this matter due to judicial activism in the extreme--that doesn't make it right. I hope every doctor in Montana puts a plaque in his or her office declaring, "This is an assisted suicide free zone."
The policy states that the organization acknowledges that some treatments to eliminate pain and suffering could hasten a patient's death, but "does not accept the proposition that death with dignity may be achieved only through physician-assisted suicide." Dr. Kirk Stoner of Plentywood, president of the MMA, says assisted suicide goes against the group's ethics. "Our reason for being is to care for our patients," he said.
Labels: Montana. Assisted Suicide. Non Cooperation. Montana Medical Association.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 1:28 PM
28 Comments
28 Comments:
Where in the constitution is there written in the "right" to have your life ended by someone, or where is there the "right" to end someone else's life (as in euthanasia or abortion)? The judge would have to really bend and twist the Constitution to make it fit.
Not trying to sound cold, but if she WANTS to kill herself why doesn't she just do it? Why does she have to drag other people into her situation? How selfish can she be? Her life will be ended, but those left behind - relatives and those she wants to assist her in her death - will have the memory of having ended someone's life. This isn't compassion.
Mia: Well said. I don't think there's any way to bend and twist the Constitution to make it fit; would have to break and pulverize it. That's a good point about euthanasia; using another word doesn't make it not murder. Intentional killing is murder. Killing oneself is killing someone; assisting in suicide, like euthanasia, is murder. Someone who suicides can't be held accountable, which doesn't mean that suicide shouldn't be illegal; not making it illegal devalues the person. Someone who "assists" in suicide can, and should, and must be held accountable. If the person can't suicide on their own, they wouldn't end up dead if it weren't for the person who "assists" them. The world has gone plumb crazy.
In one corner, Kevorkian and Quill, in the other, Stoner. Which would one want for one's doctor?
p.s. It's not about compassion, just like "ethics committees" and "bioethics" aren't about ethics. Those who have it don't claim to have it and label themselves as having it, they exercise it, and they don't force their agenda on others or claim to speak for others. Watch what they do, not what they say.
"I feel as though my doctors do not feel able to respect my decision to choose aid in dying,"
This single statement is so incredibly full of logical fallacies it's appalling.
Her doctors can respect her decision without assisting in it. After all, she isn't locked up and forced to continue living. Obviously, her doctors have respected her wishes and have simply refused to be participants in them. Just as they cannot force her to continue living, she cannot force them into helping her die. Seems simple enough.
I'd really like to know when having a "right" to something meant having a "right" to force someone else to facilitate the action.
"I'd really like to know when having a "right" to something meant having a "right" to force someone else to facilitate the action."
Immanuel Kant might answer your question [Introduction to the Metaphysic of Morals (1)]:
"But why, then, it may be asked, is the science of morals, or moral philosophy, commonly entitled - especially by Cicero - the science of duty and not also the science of right, since duties and rights refer to each other...We know our own freedom - from which all moral laws and consequently all rights as well as all duties arise - only through the moral imperative, which is an immediate injunction of duty; whereas the conception of right as a ground of putting others under obligation has afterwards to be developed out of it."
According to Kant (assuming I've understood him here and other places correctly), if one has a right, then other's have a duty to respect that right. If a person has a right to something, his right "restricts freedom of action" on the part of others toward him [Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals, second section (2)]
Hence, I'm not a huge fan of Kant in any sense.
(1)http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16m/k16m1.html
(2)
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16prm/prm3.html
TruthQuestioner:Even assuming that PAS is a "right" in the sense Kant meant, which I deny, "respecting" ar right of another, is not the same thing as making me forced to facilitate the exercise thereof.
Kant was against suicide, by the way.
If only they would lose that "death with dignity" phrase.
The whole Kant thing makes my head hurt. Life really isn't that complicated.
If people's own choices are to be respected, what business do others have getting involved in them, or in facilitating them or their exercising them?
The Gray Panthers endorsed assisted suicide, at the same time saying they knew it was apt to lead to abuse and instances in which those who did not want to die being "euthanized." Now what kind of "respecting choices" is that?
Call me simple, but I don't think death is good. I don't think there's any way to make it good, and assisted suicide advocates claiming that that's possible aren't respecters of choice; they're advocates of death, plain and simple. Doctors can respect somone's right to want it, but they can't participate and still be doctors. They have a right to be what they are supposed to be. Not that many of them are that these days, but why let things ge even worse? Those who want to have every possible chance to survive, and who want to go down fighting have a right to do that, and their right to do that supersedes that of those who don't, whose preference, if indulged as they wish it to be, will continue to be disrespected as it is already. Like I said, call me simple; I think life takes precedence over death and the right to live outweighs the right to die. So someone feels her doctors don't respect her wishes. She's lucky she's not in the position of those whose wishes they REALLY don't respect, and she has a lot of nerve feeling "deprived" of what, if granted, will cause even more murders than we've already got. She wants to be "sure" of how she will die. Same idiocy that leads people to sign "living wills."
Well they say that some who commit suicide want to take others with them.
Wesley,
Could you comment on 'conscience legislation', the current status of such legislation, and the impact of that controversy on 'right to die' states? A lot of my friends are up in arms over the current administrations decision to strike down some of the previous administrations protection of conscience for health care workers. I've heard a lot about this with regards to abortion, but not /w regards to euthanasia.
Kate: I have written here about it. It is one of the most important issues going into the next several years. I also have other articles that will come out about it. Needless to say, I believe in strong conscience clauses. I have also issued a comment via my Discovery Institute fellowship on the Obama plan to revoke the Bush regulation. I will be linking that here soon.
By a statment, I meant I formally commented to the HHS on the revocation plan.
lanthe - your comment, in which you agree with Mia's take on euthanasia and abortion, ignores the foundational case underlying these issues: Griswold v. Connecticut. Roe v. Wade, by way of example, is simply an extension of the privacy principle in Griswold. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that the State of Connecticut's prohibiting contraception, even when practiced by married couples, was an unreasonable intrusion into the most intimate aspects of their lives. Some, of course, will disagree; to them I respectfully (Wesley, please note the adverb) suggest they consider taking up residence in the Vatican. But, lanthe --- Griswold most certainly did not "pulverize" the Constitution; it simply articulated and gave substance to a right that was always implicit in it: the right to privacy. Now the question is, what may be the limitations on that right. There, I believe, we all have room for honest disagreement.
"If only they would lose that "death with dignity" phrase."
Would it be preferable if people died with INdignity, vegetating, stoned by so-called "palliatives" in between diaper changes, in order that they not offend other people's moral sensibilities. What about THEIR OWN sensibilities? Tell me how Terri Schiavo, insensible to the world and without any hope of recovery, was really enjoying life lying there for a decade with one tube running into her body and another running out. Would you have condemned her to that kind of existence for the rest of her natural life even if she had specifically stated that she wanted no food or hydration were she to be in that condition? I think that's about as reasonable as that damn fool bishop excommunicating the doctors who performed an abortion on a nine year-old Brazilian girl who had been raped. Are we to sacrifice every last vestige of compassion to some theological principle? That's the other side of that famous slippery slope the "life at any cost" folks are always talking about; the side they never seem able to address.
HW: Griswold, "by way of example," is not the foundational case, though it could be invoked, I suppose, with respect to the physician's right to privacy in terms of his or her right to refuse to cause the ending of a life, or re the patient's own choice, and if both are involved in a situation one's right, if Griswold is correct, is as valid as the other's. The right to life is foundational to the Constitution itself. "Living wills"/advance directives are bogus from the get-go, as one cannot know in advance what the full circumstances really will be, and what one's choice will be if they should arise, and in fact were introduced as a means to get rid of the elderly and the disabled; courts and legislators refused to ratify them for decades, and their existence has coincided with all hell breaking loose. As you may have seen in my comments here often, my frame of reference is not religious; in fact I have long thought that the Catholic church, often referenced re "right to life," historically has helped to create the culture of death despite its theological position on the sanctity of human life, and last year a bishop who has earned far worse appellation than damned fool was in large part responsible for the death of a member of my family who indicated clearly awareness and desire to continue to live not only to me, but to third parties; the existence of a "living will" she'd been rooked into purportedly signing was used as excuse to murder her, and the same has happened to many others, and to many re whom a "living will" did not even exist. Courts and legislatures refused to ratify such "advanced directives," which even an "end-of-life specialist" and proponent of their validity has told me actually were created "in order to save costs by getting rid of the elderly and the disabled," for decades, and for good reason; when they gained "legitimacy," all hell broke loose. Media reports of such cases are not sufficient to form judgement based on them; medical professionals don't have all the answers and what they and hospitals say cannot be trusted; once someone has the status of life on life support that status cannot be taken away from them any more than a cane can be taken away from a blind person or a prosthetic from an amputee or a transplanted organ from its recipient; when someone is ready to die, they do, even on life support, and not killing someone is not "condemning" them to live; one can only "condemn" someone to die, and that happens all the time now, even when the person's own preference is to live. Calling it "condemning" someone (someone one does not even know, has never even seen, no less) to a state of life which in one's own stated opinion is not worth living contradicts the very Griswold you invoke (it's not your life; it's theirs)and is mere wordplay intended to promote a particular agenda. There's enough medical arrogance, incompetence, self-interest, and lack of ethics as it is; those at the mercy of that hardly deserve for the rest of the world to go along with it.
And yes, the right to live supersedes "the right to die."
HW: There's no point in blaming theology; many who hold the viewpoint you oppose are not even religious. I've seen a bishop and a diocese refuse to extend compassion to someone who wanted to live, and "compassion" invoked as excuse to kill someone who wanted to live, and it's happened over and over. I hear "compassion" or "ethics" and I remember what someone once said about how whenever they hear someone say "I'm just an old back-country lawyer," they reach for their wallet to make sure it's still there. (Just an example, and no reflection intended on lawyers, of whom I think far more highly than I do of the medical profession as it is today, or of religion.)
lanthe --- I think you misunderstood my point with respect to abortion. Griswold v. Connecticut is the foundational case on the "right to reproductive privacy." With respect to abortion, Roe v. Wade is an outgrowth of the privacy rights articulated by the Supreme Court in Griswold. Do you disagree with the Court's holding in Griswold? Yes? No? Maybe?
With respect to the Constitution, it is the rights of CITIZENS to life, liberty and property that are protected by the 14th Amendment --- which also defines citizens as those BORN or naturalized in the US (emphasis added). The Court has determined that fetuses do not have legal personhood under the 14th Amendment, therefore their "right to life" may be balanced against other freedoms.
Consider, however, the case of an adult whose "rights to life, liberty and property" ARE protected by the Constitution. Those rights are protected against violation by others against the will of the individual, except in such exceptional cases as legally imposed sanctions: fines, imprisonment or execution.
I would ask you, then: "What are one's rights with respect to one's own life?" Just as the right to free speech includes the right to remain silent, and the right to practice one's religion includes the right to practice no religion at all, I suggest to you that one's right to life includes one's right to discontinue living, and therefore includes the right to suicide. Similarly, it can be argued that the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizens' "liberty" includes the liberty to terminate one's own life when desired. And, since suicide is not a criminal act in many jurisdictions it stands to reason that assisting someone in a legal act (such as a doctor might do by fulfilling a patient's request for a drug which the doctor is legally licensed to prescribe) should not be a criminal act in those same jurisdictions.
Mind you, I am not talking about active euthanasia. I think everyone here is (or certainly should be) opposed to it. I'm talking about individual freedoms that our Constitution purports to guarantee, vs. the desire some people have to restrict the exercise of those freedoms by others on the basis of their own personal religious and/or ethical views.
HW-Just a reminder, in case you've been neglecting your history as of late: TERRI SCHIAVO DID NOT HAVE A LITVING WILL.
HW: I think that suicide should be illegal. Not that anyone can do anything about it after the fact, and not for any religious reason, but because everyone is someone, and taking one's own life is killing someone. When someone kills someone else, of course, one is definitely interfering with the right to life of a person, and it's murder in the United States whether or not the person is a U.S. citizen, isn't it? Personally I think the government should stay out of issues of abortion and birth control, and no, I don't think that people with particular religious views should interfere in things that are not a matter of law. But at a certain point law and ethics do coincide. As for assisted suicide, if it's suicide, it's still killing, but no one else is involved in the act; the word is "killing" "of oneself" (sui). Assisted suicide brings someone else in to the act, and is in fact an oxymoron; that person is actually doing the killing, and intentinally, and that's murder, whether the person who ends up dead "asked for it" or not.
HW: To clarify (I'm a little tired today, just getting over the flu), personally I think that the government should stay out of issues of birth control, and no, I don't think that people with particular religious views should try to interfere via the law with things that are not properly a matter of law; but at a certain point the law and ethics do coincide. I also don't think that it should be legal to end the life of anyone in any way except in cases of capital punishment (and even with respect to capital punishment, in most cases I'd prefer to see life imprisonment) of convicted criminals whose convictions had been absolutely sound. That of course opens up the question of abortion, and the question of when a foetus is viable, etc., which is damned complicated, and it would be simpler, on principle, to say just make it illegal if the law has to be involved in it at all, and for non-religious reasons (I've never understood the need for religion at all) I think we'd probably be better off that way; for one thing, the question of when is life life or not life at its beginning stage, and the right to end it before "birth," has coincided with the debate over when is life no longer life at the other end of the life spectrum, and the issues of "endoflife," "choices," assisted suicide, and euthanasia, along with the latter having become prevalent and simply called, with medical endorsement, something else, e.g. "disconnection from life support." We haven't gotten control over the end of our lives; we've given it away; similarly, conservative feminists oppose abortion on the grounds that it is not in women's best interest, and I agree with them on that, not on religious grounds; some things should be not matters of law, but just better not done. Killing someone who already unarguably has achieved the status of life, by any means, however, must be illegal. Life and death transcend the law, whose purpose is to protect the former, not the latter; the law can't make anyone who isn't alive be alive, and by the same token it can't justly make anyone who's already been born not be alive, or condone that happening, unless they're a convicted criminal from whom the innocent and vulnerable rest of society can't be protected any other way. And no one is more innocent and vulnerable than someone on life support.
As for ending up on life support, from what I've seen, and lfrom what I've learned of in other cases, much of the time it happens because of hospital and medical negligence. Make sure, in hospital or, via the current system we've got, before hospitalization, to have gotten them to sign a document beforehand, make assisted suicide available, etc., and we end up with doctors and hospitals freer to commit malpractice with impunity, as if "well, they were old" weren't enough of a problem already, and commit "legally" what is actually euthanasia, which is murder. If this doesn't stop, we're all going to be at grave risk of facing it one day. It's one thing to say well if everything's been done right and I've had the best chance possible and it's just my time, don't force me to go on; that, however, often is not the scenario when the same doctors and institution that messed one up want to pull the plug rather than let one go elsewhere and their negligence be discovered, and now one is at the mercy of the "judgement" and "opinion" of those who put one into worse condition than one came into hospital; they're going to find a way to prevent you from getting out of there alive one way or another; you want to make it even easier for them by having a "living will"? There's no way to know when one signs one of those things what the situation actually will be if it ever manifests. Anything is possible, but if I had to guess, I'd guess that you're not a medmal attorney. See enough of what goes on in those places and you might see how "the right to assisted suicide" and the actuality of euthanasia are not discrete. Lawyers are trained to think logically; doctors are not. In fact, thinking logically and reasonably and ethically can put one at even more risk from them; that's not their world; it's like being in a foreign country where a different language is spoken.
lanthe: while I agree that "assisted suicide brings someone else in to the act", I disagree both with your dismissal of "assisted suicide" as an oxymoron and with your argument that "that person [the one who assists] is actually doing the killing, and intentinally, and that's murder, whether the person who ends up dead 'asked for it' or not."
The person who makes the means available, understanding that they may be used at some future date, is complicit, but passive complicity of this type is far different from the act of placing a plastic bag over someone's face or intentionally kicking the plug of his respirator out of the wall. Remember, I said I wasn't talking about active euthanasia, in which the physician or "assistant" actually administers the lethal dose.
Consider the following: during World War II certain behind-the-lines operatives of O.S.S. requested and were given cyanide capsules to be used if capture was imminent, enabling them to avoid torture at the hands of the Gestapo. By your standard the person dispensing the capsule to an agent for some conditional future use would be a murderer if the recipient actually used it. I don't think that's what you have in mind, is it?
Sorry to hear you've been ill. Hope you'll feel better soon.
SAFEpres: I'm sorry if I gave the impression that Schiavo had a living will. She didn't, and THAT'S what all the fuss was about.
HW: But this isn't wartime, and it's not military service, in which potential death is part of the deal, or O.S.S. stuff; it's civilians in the peacetime, supposedly civilized, considered so valuable and life-oriented that wars are fought to bring about, protect, and preserve it, and the OSS agent hasn't said I want to die, help me; the OSS agent doesn't even want to die; the cynanide is a just-in-case resource for an in extremis situation that might or might not manifest in wartime, which is an in extremis scenario in general, and it's to help the agent avoid the suffering of torture, but also to prevent the agent from spilling the beans under torture and thus jeopardizing the entire military effort and its objective. That kind of in extremis isn't analogous to the in extremis of the person who wants suicide in peacetime, and whether it's a placing a plastic bag over someone's head, kicking the plug out of the wall, or handing them a pill to use whenever, the person still ends up dead and would not have otherwise. It can't be shaved that fine, and by definition assisted suicide is an oxymoron; if it's not done by oneself, it's not suicide. When the OSS agent is given the cyanide pellet for just in case, he doesn't want to have o use it and the one who gives it to him doesn't want him to have to use it either. When I heard that a family friend asked for his pistol to be brought to him in the hospital when he was dying of cancer while I was in college, I had no doubt that if someone brought it to him, he would use it, and I still believe he would have. Actually, if it was the same hospital that did what it did to my mother, and has done likewise to others, if someone had brought him his gun and he'd shot himself, it might have gotten the hospital the kind of attention it deserves ("it's so bad there a patient shot himself"), but even that wouldn't have affected the arrogance of the place. I don't think that someone bringing him the gun would be as bad as "euthanasia" of someone who doesn't want to die. But I don't think it should be done, or be legal, either, or that a doctor should do the equivalent, or have to.
The hospital I just mentioned, by the way, is one who boasts of its "world-famous" "star," who, as I did not know when I took someone there because it seemed a logical choice at the time in terms of its having the most resources available in the area, has referred publicly to having participated in an assisted suicide and was sued by the NYS Attorney General, whose case prevailed in the Supreme Court. And look what happened to her, as, I learned too late, it has to others there. Certain things, like assisted suicide, the "end of life" shibboleth, and euthanasia, do travel the same road in the land of the culture of death. Anyway, thanks, HW, for the get-well-soon wishes. I hope I do too; had flu same time last year, while trying to prepare for the "guardianship" hearing, which, well, there are lawyers in town who term such cases a racket, and the statute, Article 81 of the NYSMHL, born on April 1, 1993, came into being fairly contemporaneous with the ratification of "living wills." It's kept rather quiet, and comes out of left field, as intended. You wouldn't want your chosen proxy and holder of your POA to go through it if you ended up in the same situation, which is why the Illinois Right To Life Foundation, I think that's the one, which can be googled, advises, for a wholly sectarian reason, to "tear up your living will." They should say revoke, of course. In any event, if a hospital wants to pull the plug, whether you want the plug pulled on you or not, they'll find a way to do it, and the NYS "guardianship" statute makes it easier for them to do it, and a "living will" makes it even easier. Not safe to trust in what and whom you'd think you should be able to trust, and that's why he culture of death has got to be stopped.
Correction (again): The organization that advises to get rid of one's living will does that because people "deemed" "no longer aware" are disconnected from life support when they ARE aware, and know that they are being murdered. What the family, the patient's chosen health care proxy and attorney-in-fact who can be pushed aside via "guardianship" proceeding, etc. go through is horrendous, but not as bad as what the patient suffers as the result of having signed one of those damned fool "documents" that get presented to everyone doing "estate planning" these days as if they were as necessary as vaccinations. Remember what's really behind them, and that no one can know in advance what the actual circumstances in which it is brought into play would be.
lanthe: I understand your position, but disagree that warfare is an exception. To accept that, I'd have to believe that doing a bad thing for a "bad" reason is bad, but doing the same bad thing for a "good" reason is OK.
Or maybe we do agree after all. Maybe assisting someone's suicide may be OK "under the right circumstances" --- and all we have to do is agree on which circumstances are the "right" ones.
As usual, the devil is in the details.
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