Montana has become the third state to approve physician-assisted suicide, after a divided State Supreme Court voted in a 5-3 ruling that said physician assisted suicide violates no laws . Read it here in the Christian Science Monitor.
As curtjester noted on a post below, once again it’s the courts doing the dirty work.
Death is sweetly seductive. We can so easily solve our most intractable problems by recourse to it. It requires no imagination, no imperative for scientific discovery, no advance in technology. It short-circuits the imperative to advance the science and art of palliative care. Excruciating suffering is not necessary at the end, execution even less so.
It’s the surrender of the smallest minds among us, and reminds us that all groups of humans will descend to the operational level of its smallest minds without vigilant leadership. It takes courage and vision, fortitude and skill to advance a civilization.
This ruling reminds us that the life issues will never be secured permanently. The mendacity of the cowardly is boundless.
As with all pro-death boilerplate, the label betrays the ignominious reality. Death with dignity isn’t. There is nothing dignified in the perversion of science and medicine, in physicians pulling double-duty as healer and executioner.
It isn’t enough to protest physician assisted suicide. We must demand that NIH fund research into pain management, that the government and medical schools fund departments and establish chairs of pain management, that graduate schools of Nursing do the same.
We must read Seduced By Death, by Herbert Hendin, a psychiatrist in favor of physician assisted suicide until he traveled to the Netherlands and saw their experiment in full throttle.
Above all, we must be prayerful warriors, relying on God’s grace to strengthen and empower us.
I sympathize with the woman who knew she had the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and wished to close out her life before she lost her personality. I really would not want anyone to go to prison for helping her. On the other hand, I know enough about the way the modern medical bureaucracy works, to understand that “talking to the family” as a means of emptying out a hospital bed that could be bringing in new revenue, among other abuses, is a very real hazard. Once allowed, it is all to easy to make it almost mandatory, or at least to exert overwhelming peer pressure in that direction.
Here is what I am trying to formulate as a written instruction for my own medical care:
If I am chronically incapable of giving informed consent for my own treatment, then there is to be no surgical intervention, no invasive procedure, no sustained use of IV or feeding tubes, or machine-assisted heart or lung functions. Don’t give me poison, but let nature take its course. No person is authorized by me to authorize such treatment, and I leave written instruction forbidding it.
Absent medical technology, if my mind is gone, chances are I would succumb soon to some infection, or combination of infections, or one or more organs would give out. Let them. Do not prolong my life, lying in a bed, unable to respond to the world.
I think that is both reasonable and morally defensible. I wouldn’t even have a problem with making it the default protocol in the absence of any instructions by the patient. Yes, among other things, it would save costs and lower everyone’s health insurance premiums, but it makes sense too. However, if the patient directs otherwise, I can find no moral basis for empowering anyone else to order that the plug be pulled against the patient’s wishes. It may be rational, but there is too much we don’t know and can never know. No social authority should second-guess the patient’s express wishes.
FYI…might be interested in the radio show I did recently re: Dr.-Assisted Self-Murder in Montana;comments welcome.
http://www.iotconline.com/radio/aview/TAV%20DrAsstMurder_Jan7.mp3
John Lofton, Editor, TheAmericanView.com
Communications Director, Institute on the Constitution
Host, “TheAmericanView” radio show
Recovering Republican
JLof@aol.com