Olympia, WA (LifeNews.com) — A new report from the Washington health department reveals at least 36 people died after they killed themselves under the first year of the state’s new law legalizing assisted suicides. The law was only enacted for nine months during 2009 after voters approved it on the 2008 ballot.
This is only the beginning. A patient, terrified of what-death itself? The sudden realization of finality? Fear of nonbeing? These, tied up with the thought of pain and suffering in a mutual synergy producing for the patient realities that will in all likelihood never come to pass.
Most patients who receive terminal diagnoses fear the loss of control. Suicide gives them that which their fear drives them toward-control over their ending. But why should medicine be allowed to play along in this tragic delusional thought? What is ironic is that these laws are being passed at precisely the moment in history when palliative care is undergoing revolutionary advances. If ever there were a time for medicine to coordinate its forces in psychiatry and palliative care, this is that time. However, that is not the consensus among those going into medicine, nursing, and public health.
Over at Jill Stanek’s site, I was participating in a discussion this week about the regrets felt by post-abortive mothers. Based on the testimonies of hundreds of women, I wrote the following:
“They all describe the same experience.:
Cold room.
Cold metal table.
Cold impersonal staff.
Cold, unfeeling physicians.
Cold and despair filled post-op rooms.
The word here is COLD, which conveys the essence of murder, of lifelessness, of lovelessness.”
A young woman, Megan, who is herself proudly unrepentant in her post-abortive state, and pursuing a Master of Public Health Degree wrote the following in reply:
“Gerard, shut up. I don’t apologize for my incivility. You have NO idea what you’re talking about. I’ve sat on “cold, metal tables” in an abortion clinic and many hospitals. Ho-hum. Neoliberalism dictates that efficiency is our highest virtue, rather than attentive care and compassion. When my mother was hospitalized with sequelae from her second pregnancy, nobody tucked her in with fluffy pink pillows. “Coldness” characterizes the ENTIRE medical system.”
This is what is increasingly being heard as the voice from within the medical establishment. There are connections between abortion and suicide.
They are both motivated by fear, by a sense that control is slipping from their hands.
They are both motivated by hopelessness, by a sense that the future holds no redeeming value.
They are both motivated by a sense of helplessness, a fatalism firmly rooted in fear and hopelessness.
With an ever-increasing number of abortions comes an ever-increasing number of medical professionals who have in some way participated in them, personally or professionally. The callous disregard for the fears and suffering of young women who do not realize the resources available to them fuels the numbers of innocent lives terminated and the transitioning of the woman’s mental suffering from temporary state in early pregnancy to life-long guilt and despair for all too many.
As predicted by Pope Paul VI, callousness on the one end of the life spectrum with abortion would deaden sensibilities to related issues on the other end of the life spectrum with disability and terminal illness. At their root, these issues are about people being cut off from their essential human identity. It is about loss of community and family.We have for too long tolerated the silent holocaust of abortion, and we see in Megan’s howl of despair the effects of a loveless world.
It’s time to get busy, busier than ever in evangelizing a world of Megans. The events in Washington are indeed cause for alarm, but they also represent an opportunity waiting to be seized. They open the door to the conversation of what it means to be fully human and what each person is due based on their intrinsic value. These events present us with the opportunity to push for palliative care, and to roundly condemn the medical community for cooperating in intrinsic evil. They present us with the opportunity to discuss the extent to which medicine is becoming more of what Megan has described.
Sure it’s unpleasant to talk about. But at this moment in history we have been called to this specific task, to witness to the Gospel of Life lovingly and joyfully, to bring light into darkness, and hope into despair.
Coming Home 
Let’s start by dealing with “cold.” Incidentally, whatever the other merits or demerits may be, I’m put off by anyone opening with “Shut up” on the grounds that they adhere to a different viewpoint. Even if she were right, it wouldn’t advance her point to suppress your voice. It also doesn’t give me a sense that Megan is confident of her own position. It is all too true that medicine is in many ways cold. That’s part of the problem, not a foundation for the future.
Someone SHOULD have tucked her mother in with fluffy pink pillows. A nurse should CARE whether her patients live or die, and whether they are comfortable. It is far from true that no nurse does care, and I know there are some limits to how involved a nurse can become. A very dear friend of mine worked in a specialized hospital for the terminally ill — seeing patients die comes with the territory. Each one can’t become a life-shattering tragedy for the care-taker, or nobody could handle the job. Still, when a patient says they feel trickling down their throat, someone should care to LOOK before deciding whether it is bleeding or a phantom feeling. Instinct and feel are part of good medicine. Protocols were made for man, not man for the protocols (genetic usage, including women).
Can assisted suicide ever be “warm”? I recall an account by a resident called “It’s Over Debbie.” I believe he genuinely couldn’t stand the pain his patient was in, and perhaps she couldn’t either. On the other hand, I recall a TV review of the treatment of a young woman in England with terminal bone cancer. A daily shot of heroin made it possible for her to move around normally, play with her children, make the most of her last six months. No doctor in the USA would be allowed to give her heroin, but everything has its proper purpose as well as its potential for abuse.
I sympathize with the notion that if I lose control, this body will no longer be me — just as a prefrontal lobotomy would rob me of a great deal of myself. But I prefer in that event to let nature take its course — that leaves room for miracles, without unduly prolonging the inevitable. Meantime, I’d like to know that I am more than just a statistic in a flow chart.
This speaks to me on a personal level, because my mother graduated from nursing school, but her own sudden ill health prevented her from actually practicing nursing, but later she DID become a Hospice volunteer. She would have been ‘the perfect’ nurse, because she was intelligent and compassionate. The ‘abortion’ part is personal because my young niece is still suffering the effects of her abortion almost two years later….physically, psychologically, spiritually. She refuses help, because she thinks she ‘deserves’ to suffer for what she’s done. She described the experience the same way…cold, sterile. Just my ‘2 cents’.
Pamela, I pray that your young niece will seek healing and forgiveness.
She needs to know that God loves her and that no sin is to big to be forgiven.
It is those closest to her that must somehow bring her to this point.
She will be in my prayers.