Physician assisted death should it remain illegal

Contact Us. Join Us! Media Resources. Position Statements. Public Policy. Washington Office. Donate Now. September 14, Rex Greene, M. Schneider Cancer Center at Mills Health Center in San Mateo, California and a leader in bioethics, health policy and oncology, underscored the heightened danger to the poor.

Supporters of assisted suicide frequently say that HMOs will not use this procedure as a way to deal with costly patients. Supporters argue that this is a mere. The researchers based their findings on the average cost to Medicare of patients with only four weeks or less to live. Yet assisted suicide proposals as well as the law in Oregon define terminal illness as having six months to live.

The researchers also assumed that about 2. But the failure of large numbers of Dutch physicians to report such deaths casts considerable doubt on this estimate. And how can one compare the U. Taken together, these factors would skew the costs much higher Rowen, Fear, bias, and prejudice against disability play a significant role in assisted suicide.

Who ends up using assisted suicide? Supporters advocate its legalization by arguing that it would relieve untreated pain and discomfort at the end of life. This fear of disability typically underlies assisted suicide. But as many thousands of people with disabilities who rely on personal assistance have learned, needing help is not undignified, and death is not better than reliance on assistance. Have we gotten to the point that we will abet suicides because people need help using the toilet?

Suicide requests from people with terminal illness are usually based on fear and depression. As Herbert Hendin, M. Most cases of depression among terminally ill people can be successfully treated. Catholic Conference, Yet primary care physicians are generally not experts in diagnosing depression. Where assisted suicide is legalized, the depression remains undiagnosed, and the only treatment consists of a lethal prescription.

Everyone else is supposedly protected and not eligible for assisted suicide. But it is extremely common for medical prognoses of a short life expectancy to be wrong.

With every disease other than cancer, there is no predictability at all Lamont, ; Maltoni, ; Christakis and Iwashyna, ; Lynn, Prognoses are based on statistical averages, which are nearly useless in predicting what will happen to an individual patient.

Thus, the potential effect of assisted suicide is extremely broad, far beyond the supposedly narrow group its proponents claim. The affected group could include many people who may be mistakenly diagnosed as terminal but who have many meaningful years of life ahead of them. This also poses considerable danger to people with new or progressive disabilities or diseases.

Research overwhelmingly shows that people with new disabilities frequently go through initial despondency and suicidal feelings, but later adapt well and find great satisfaction in their lives Harris, ; Gerhart, ; Cameron, ; Ray and West, ; Stensman, ; Whiteneck, ; Eisenberg and Saltz, People with new diagnoses of terminal illness appear to go through similar stages New York State Task Force, Neither do other alleged safeguards offer any real protections.

The compliant physicians were often assisted suicide advocates. Her physician refused to prescribe lethal medication, because he thought the request, rather than being Ms. So the family found another doctor, and Ms. Cheney soon used the prescribed drugs and died. Another purported safeguard is that physicians are required to discuss alternatives to assisted suicide. However, there is no requirement that these alternatives be made available.

Further, the Kate Cheney case demonstrates the shocking laxness with which safeguards in Oregon are being followed. Cheney decided to take the lethal medication after spending just a week in a nursing home, to give her family a break from caretaking. The chronology shows that Cheney felt she had only three choices: burdening her family, the hell of a nursing home, or death.

It stated, in part:. What in-home services was Ms. Cheney receiving? How is it that Ms. Cheney had to spend a week in a nursing home to give her family respite from caregiving? Did Ms. Cheney and her family know of other respite options? If not, who failed to tell them? Or did the family choose the nursing home respite option with the knowledge of other alternatives an even more disturbing possibility?

For one, we should not as a rule grant doctors the prerogative to help kill their patients. The whole history of medicine has been one of improved healing or, in terminal cases, reduced suffering; euthanasia, which devalues life to the point of liquidation, is the precise opposite of good and responsible medical care. To legalize suicide in this way is to weaponize the medical system against the very people to which it should be most attentive.

On a deeper, more substantive level, legalized suicide strikes at the heart of one of the most indispensible ideas in human history: That every human life is precious beyond reckoning and worthy of both honor and protection.

Killing someone, even someone who is already dying, directly controverts this principle; you cannot inject people with fatal doses of barbiturates without declaring, however implicitly, that their lives are worth less than an artificial minimum standard.

More: I have cancer. Here's why I might decide to end my life. Or not. Those who advocate for legalized suicide see it as a matter of radical autonomy: We should leave it up to each individual to determine the worth of his own life, up to and including an act of suicide. But this is simply an evasive, almost cowardly instance of passing the buck.

If you are actively or even passively complicit in an act of euthanasia, you cannot say you do not, in some way, agree with the suicidal person's assertion that his life is a waste and that he is better off dead. Rather than kill ourselves when life gets lonely, frightening or painful, we might assume as a matter of course that things can get better, that there are people who can help us, that this, too, shall pass.

The protections in the statutes ensure that patients remain the driving force in end-of-life care discussions. Two waiting periods, the first between the oral requests, the second between receiving and filling the prescription, are required.