By Romona Paden
In 1975, 21-year-old Karen Ann Quinlan fell into a vegetative state after mixing alcohol and Valium. When Quinlan’s parents requested removal of the life-support respirator administered by doctors, local prosecutors threatened homicide charges against any hospital official who complied.
As the case entered the legal sphere, much centered on the definition and application of “extraordinary means” of life-saving care. Finally, a decision was handed down by the New Jersey Supreme Court allowing for the removal of the respirator. Miss Quinlan, however, continued breathing on her own and lived ten more years in a nursing home nourished through a feeding tube.
“We never wanted her to die,” Quinlan’s mother said of the situation.
The layers of nuance in the Quinlan case spurred a national debate around morals, bioethics, and euthanasia. The progression of the debate to 2019 demonstrates a slippery slide as legislators around the country embrace and promote the death option—especially for society’s most vulnerable populations.
Euthanasia, mercy killing, and assisted suicide target disabled and elderly elements of the population. Regardless of what it’s called, proponents of these legal positions in other countries have wholeheartedly embraced the notion of disposable humanity.
Legislators wrestle with efforts to create an “acceptable” legal definition of characteristics associated with legitimate reasons to permit the withdrawal of a life. Known under a variety of euphemisms, right-to-die legislation—euthanasia, physician-assisted suicide, death with dignity, and so on—embraces the pursuit of death.
Death with Dignity, an organization promoting the “basic idea that it is the terminally ill people, not government...politicians...or religious leaders…who should make their end-of-life decisions” believes that people have the right to decide how much pain and suffering they must endure and determine when death has become the preferable option.
Despite the irony of seeking legislation in order to avoid state and institutional interference, the Death with Dignity statement speaks to a well-meaning position centered on enabling an escape plan for those faced with an unyielding circumstance.
But from a rational perspective, our understandable sympathy begets unintended—and to many, unacceptable—consequences. In countries where assisted suicide is legal, it is also more and more frequent, with proliferating accounts of unrequested doctor-assisted deaths.
In the United States, according to one report, an intensive-care doctor prescribed “excessive” pain medication, far beyond what was needed to provide comfort and at a potentially fatal level, to at least 27 patients between 2015 and 2018. Each of the affected patients was described as having been near death. Each patient’s family members had requested halting life-saving measures.
The story becomes even more egregious considering that pharmacists and nurses assisting with patient care acted in support of the doctor. If prosecutors prove allegations, it demonstrates staffers’ belief in right-do-die propaganda.
In Belgium and the Netherlands, “euthanasia of people with mental illnesses or cognitive disorders, including dementia, is now a common occurrence,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Bureaucrats defend the practice, which includes euthanizing patients in their 20s and 30s who are diagnosed with mental illness, as wholly in keeping within legal guidelines. Of course, this ignores the essential objections: Are the mentally ill less capable of forming a “true will”? Are their intentions intrinsically more difficult for a doctor—or anyone—to establish? Are they capable of evaluating a situation that asks them to make a life-or-death decision? Do we have the right to decide that their intellectual limitations make them so invaluable as human beings that we can simply dispose of them? In some countries the answer is yes. Is that an answer we Americans have come to feel comfortable with?
Too frequently, the establishment demonstrates excessive mission-driven zeal in executing right-to-die actions, and the public as well is beginning to demonstrate a finance-driven philosophy. In a 2013 study of 84 Facebook groups comprised of 20 to 29 year olds, university researchers reported pervasive comments like, “Seniors are burden to society,” “I hate everything about them,” “They don’t contribute to society,” as well as the desire to see “anyone over age 69 immediately be put in front of a firing squad!”
Underscoring this, former President Obama addressed the issue of end-of-life care costs by suggesting, “Maybe you’re better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller.” Perhaps it is the pressure of crushing student loan debt and low-wage jobs that contribute to the callousness and animosity of these young people, but would they make the same proclamations if the elderly people in question were their parents or grandparents?
“There is a growing tendency to promote ‘mercy killing’ as a solution to not just suffering, pain, but aging, mental or physical challenges, social ills, and even rising health costs and cost containment,” according to the Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s (EPC) list of concerns. Other EPC observations include:
- Sanction of euthanasia and assisted suicide as a gateway to euthanasia without consent, circumvention of the law, and abuse of vulnerable citizens
- Threats to hospice and palliative care and pain management advances
- Lack of instruction to medical professionals regarding hospice and palliative care and effective pain control
- Lack of willingness to acknowledge depression as a common factor in right-to-die requests and then to treat the depression
Well-intentioned government involvement will invariably develop into mission creep. Oregon is a case in point. The northwestern state spearheaded the right-to-die movement two decades ago. Dubbed Dr. Death in press reports at the time, Jack Kevorkian brought the right-to-die issue to national conversation for his advocacy of physician-assisted suicide.
“Dying is not a crime,” the pathologist said in promoting his pro-death position in the late 1990s.
Included among the individuals Kevorkian assisted in dying were people who were not suffering from any terminal illness as well as some with a history of depression.
Nevertheless, legislators ultimately adopted the Oregon Death with Dignity Act, which went into effect in 1998. In the 21 years since adoption of the “world’s first assisted dying statute,” according to its website’s information, “a total of 2,216 people has received prescriptions under the Act, of whom 1,459, or 65.8 percent, have died from ingesting lethal doses of medications.”
In a January 2019 Euthanasia Prevention Coalition blog entry, Executive Director Alex Schadenberg responded to the information by pointing out that the Oregon Health Authority (OHA) once again achieved their standard year-over-year increase of right-to-die deaths in the state.
OHA information describes victims of these deaths as mostly over age 65 with a diagnosis of cancer. “Similarly, the most frequently reported end-of-life concerns were loss of autonomy (91.7%), decreasing ability to participate in activities that made life enjoyable (90.5%), and loss of dignity (66.7%).”
Despite a history of right-to-die program growth, OHA officials currently seek an expansion of definitions within the law. Under the death-creep move, terminally ill patients include those who refuse medical treatment and “therefore the new definition of terminal has an undefined and nearly unlimited application,” Schadenberg writes. “Many people who are not close to being ‘terminally’ ill have a disease that will, within reasonable medical judgement, produce or substantially contribute to death.” Including the refusal of medical treatment within the definition “enables wide-open assisted suicide.”
Still, the state’s presumptive position serves as a model for other states around the country. Washington adopted its version of the right-to-die law in 2008, and then Vermont followed suit in 2013. Since 2015, legislative bodies in California, Colorado, Hawaii, and Washington D.C. each implemented right-to-die statutes.
In a right-to-die bill under consideration within the New Mexico legislature, which Schadenberg describes as the “most extreme assisted suicide bill I have seen,” assisted suicide allowances extend to patients with psychiatric conditions and undefined “terminal” prognosis with lethal injections administered by non-doctor medical professionals—nurses and physician assistants. The bill even grants assisted suicide approvals via telemedicine.
Current legislative right-to-die debates for 2019 are also on the table for Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Utah, and Virginia.
Full Article & Source:
From The Silver Standard’s Elder Abuse Reform Now Project: RIGHT-TO-DIE LAWS HASTEN EXPENDABLE HUMANITY
JOIN The EARN Project
No comments:
Post a Comment