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ASSISTED SUICIDE'S SLIPPERY SLOPE
Thanks to the marvels of medical science, you should live to be over 80, before you find yourself dependent on your children for your basic needs. Medical technology will keep you alive artificially and make you a slave to pacemakers, and dialysis machines. It will even force you to form living wills.
You thought you were safe and now find yourself more likely not to be kept alive longer, nor make that 80th birthday. You will be forced to wish that your life would end sooner than planned. The technicalities of eldercare will change your family and require your children to struggle and balance care giving while depleting your own retirement savings in the process.
THREE STATES NOW OK PHYSICIAN ASSISTED SUICIDE
Three Western states are trying to help you out of this dilemma. Montana just recently has joined Oregon and Washington to allow patients to seek physician-assisted suicide. It’s hard to believe a conservative western state of Montana would vote for a radical social change, since their state’s constitution states an explicit right to privacy. Now your parent’s doctors can prescribe the necessary drugs without fear of being prosecuted.
Assisted suicide means providing drugs and equipment to allow your loved one to take his own life with dignity. Euthanasia is an act where someone other than the patient can stop medical treatments, withhold illegal substances, or force the end of your life as a patient.
A POLARIZING ISSUE-DOCTORS NOW THE KILLERS
This act is so polarizing; your doctors are reluctant to discuss it with you and even their own patients. To intentionally share ending someone’s human life is in total opposition to the Hippocratic oath doctors have taken for the past 200 years.
The medical profession now encourages doctors to initiate end-of-life conversations making the patient fully aware of the options of his treatments provide counseling, and support in decision-making.
NO ONE SEEKS DEATH
Most people do not seek death because they have pain, but because they fear the loss of enjoyable activities, fear losing their dignity, and fear of being burdens to their children. Hospice answers these problems by providing for the needs and medical problems, and assuring true death with dignity. The desire for suicide quickly disappears. Because your parent is dying does not make him less worthy of being loved and he need not die in agony.
THE SLIPPERY SLOPE
To legalize assisted suicide is very risky business. The Dutch have approved this for over 30 years and now have extended the criteria to killing the terminally ill, the disabled, and have abolished all rescue medical treatments. Soon infanticide, to disabled babies will be legalized.
HOW DOES THIS HELP THE STATE?
Our states services for the poor are cut to the bone, medically uninsured people exceed the entire population, and many people are now in HMOs, where limiting costs makes profits. It makes economical sense to spend $100 by assisting a patient to die rather than cause $100,000 to provide quality care to the same patient who does not commit suicide.
WHAT DOES THE DYING PATIENT NEED?
Most dying patients need love, want to be included in decision making of their medical care, and see their lives have value. Above all, they do not want to be sent to their deaths. With our broken profit driven health care system, we must weigh our private wishes with the dangers to society when we make legalized assisted suicide a public policy.
THE UNPROTECTED PATIENT
Patients now are not protected against doctors writing a prescription for the sole purpose of causing their death. The doctor has reversed his role from a healer, comforter, and consoler to a killer. Doctors should stay committed to the protection of life.
The elderly are very vulnerable, the poor and disabled are easily manipulated into accepting a prescription death if they feel they are financial and emotional burdens to their family. Health care should dress this problem not by making death the appropriate solution.
Since doctors don’t have to find solutions for medical problems, their jobs will be easier. Once you say you want to die, there is less incentive for him to care for your symptoms and needs. The only care he will need to provide is an overdose of medication.
PAIN MANAGEMENT WILL BE SOLVED
Pain management will disappear, since you will be asking to die because you will not be given pain medication. Yet, pain is really not the issue. All doctors now can treat pain even though the treatment may shorten your life, but it is not specifically aimed to cause your death. Most people, who fear death, are very independent and controlling people and refuse to go to hospice. These patients who are dying need a great deal of love and medical care that adds values their lives.
THE MESSAGE WE SEND
Dying patients are told they are burdens and because of their illness, they are less worthy of being loved, and will die in agony. Their children get the message that in this particular instance suicide is right.
COMMENTARY
Your life is more likely to end now by doctors will be asked to refuse you medical care if it extends your life artificially. It won’t matter if your family wants you to live: the answer will still be no. All medicine will be stopped and IVs will be discontinued. The medical system and doctors will teach your children how to end your life rather to extend it.
Our health system reimburses doctors for doing procedures tests. Spending hours discussing your problems is not cost effective. There is no time for discussion, reflection or explanation.
Being knowledgeable and honorable doctors, they will help you die in a reasonable and ethical manner. How can you expect our government to protect the vulnerable patients from end-of-life decisions made by doctors who spend at most 10 minutes with you?
Suffering must be somehow validated. Doctors should not have to require a terminal diagnosis before they spend most of their time talking to patients and their caregivers.
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