Most Americans believe the choice to end one’s life is a personal decision and that physician-assisted death should be legal, according to a new survey.
More than 80 percent of adults questioned in the poll by Knowledge Networks said the right to die should not be decided by the government, church or a third party, yet only 50 percent of Americans over 60 and less than 25 percent of younger people said they have a living will.
“People put that off. They’re in denial and they have their heads in the sand,” said Dave Bunnell, editor-in-chief of ELDR magazine, which commissioned the poll.
OK, let’s say I have a chronic, progressive, incurable illness. Others have found this illness so depressing that they have chosen assisted suicide. Assume that is a legal and enforcible choice, considered moral, perhaps selfless, by society. My care costs my insurance carrier (private of govt), some $200k+ per year. At what point will they decide not to pay for the expensive treatment, based on a less expensive and morally acceptable alternative?
I expect that “expanding” my rights to include a right to end my life will ultimately become a retraction of my right to live, burdening some of the weakest among us, not with a “right to die” but with a “duty to die”
R. Eric Sawyer
#1, Your extrapolation brought back memories of [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green]”Soylent Green.” [/url] Not only a duty to die but a duty to be processed into food. Ugh.
If you want to die, go ahead and kill yourself. But no, don’t ask anyone to become an accomplice in your murder — and don’t excuse anyone who accepts the offer.
It’s a personal decision. Leave your doctor out of it.
Here, as elsewhere (not least on in the case of abortion), the phrasing of pollsters’ questions hugely affects the results of the poll.
The banner above the article says: “STOP GENOCIDE NOW†– Interesting contrast.
It is very difficult to discuss this issue and be neutral or nonjudgmental. I can only say that this awakens the memory of a very personal experience. Two and a third years ago I had two people close to me experiencing pain and dying from a failing liver. One was my wife and one was a friend. Despite my wife’s pain she had the desire to fight her battle with cancer until she slipped into unconsciousness. Even then, she continued to fight it unconsciously to the end. (She was right with the Lord.) A week and a half after my wife’s funeral, my friend received a five organ transplant and will now graduate from college this Sunday. Where there is life, there is hope. Where there is suffering, there is witness.
This is a tainted survey. It was conducted online, which is not random.
Isn’t it odd how we have heard that physicians are so useless and stupid that they can be replaced by any number of providers (nurses, pharmacists, psychologists, social workers) all of whom should be given the right to prescribe and do procedures and minor surgeries.
However when it comes to bumping people off, a procedure that basically has no therapeutic benefit, and is practiced by undereducated hoodlums daily all of a sudden the doctor needs to be involved.
If folks wish to bump off their elderly parents, just as they already bump off their inconvenient offspring (via abortion) let them do so themselves and stop asking physicians to provide them with moral cover.
We just had two break-ins in my neighborhood yesterday, in broad daylight.
If this paper conducted an on-line poll, and a majority of those responding (important distinction) stated that they wanted the right to break in to someones home (who had more then they did) and take things out of it, would that be a valid call to change the laws of the U.S.?
Irenaeus is right about the question. What depresses me about the awe-struck journalism that handles these stories is that there is no grasp of how the question dictates the answer. Basically, what people hear is: ‘Do you think that if you are in extreme pain and dying slowly you should be kept alive or should a physician have the power to end your suffering?’ There is another question which is unasked: ‘Do you think that people who are terminally ill should be given every help, including sophisticated analgesia so that they are free from pain and do not need to consider euthanasia?’ As a priest I have seen the huge difference that can be made by good hospice care, which includes not just the technological side of medicine but a holistic approach that includes the psychological and social side. Naturally I wonder if I would have courage in such a situation and I was declining; I take heart from Pope John Paul’s example, and now I understand why he was prepared to soldier on in public the way that he did.
Terry Tee has nailed it. The support for assisted suicide is based on a false premise of untreatable pain. A few years ago, I was involved in a national debate on this subject, and my research caused me to change my opinions radically.
Pain is vastly more treatable than PAS proponents understand or acknowledge. The Chief of Pain Management at Sloan-Kettering, the leading US cancer hospital, confirmed this but pointed out that physicians are woefully under-educated about pain management. That is changing as pain management/palliative care is increasingly recognized as a specialty.
A related problem is that fear of lawsuits leads doctors to underprescribe due to the possibility of e.g. addiction. This is not an idle fear. I know someone who suffered chronic but not life threatening pain and was prescribed the horribly-addicting “cancer suckers”. Not a problem for a terminal patient, but clear malpractice for a non-terminal one.
Pain treatment is available all the way to “terminal sedation”, depending upon patient needs. But all such treatments stop short of active ending of life. So “untreatable’ or “intractable” pain is essentially a myth.
While relief of pain is the selling point for PAS, it is ironic that in Oregon, which allows it, the majority of patients using it have based their decision not on pain but on quality of life/humiliation (i.e. loss of control over bodily functions) reasoning. Would OR voters have passed it if they knew the truth?
Another key objection of opponents is mental competence. There is a real question whether anyone in the kind of pain described by proponents is inherently incapable of a knowing and intelligent decision to end his/her life. A real split in the mental health community on this.
Of course, as Christians, most of the foregoing is academic; we are not allowed to take innocent life. But much of the foregoing is helpful in the secular debate on the subject, which – as noted – is often sadly lacking in factual basis.
Of note, those European countries that have permitted Euthanasia have not had any growth in pain management techniques, and severely lag the US in this regard. I might also add that in the Netherlands, people are routinely euthanized for “mental suffering” including at least one perfectly healthy, older man who said that he was “bored” and had nothing to look forward to in life.
On the subject of underprescribing painkillers:
— If relieving the pain of terminally ill patients requires an “addictive” dose of a narcotic drug, then so be it. We as a society should not fuss about the possibility of the dying becoming addicted to necessary pain-killers.
— I wonder if physicians, insofar as they underprescribe pain-killers for the terminally ill, are worried less about lawsuits than about getting into trouble with the Drug Enforcement Administration.
PS to #12:
Here’s are two related—and possibly provocative—questions:
— Do any of the most effective pain-killers tend to shorten the patient’s life? If so, then . . .
— Assume that the patient is in great pain and that there is no close but safer substitute for the optimal pain-killer. Are we as Christians free to regard the shortening of life (or, if you prefer, the acceleration of death) as akin to nature taking its course?
To Irenaeus: Opiate-based pain-killers have the effect of depressing the breathing capacity. However, the dose can be increased in steps to cope with the pain. It is important to remember that it is not the drug that kills the patient, it is underlying condition. Even the Roman Catholic Church has said that (a) we need not officiously strive to keep a person alive – that is to say, we must use all ordinary means but extraordinary measures are not immoral if not used. Non-use of extraordinary measures may be because the outcome of treatment would be minimal or because it would cause disproportionate distress to the patient; (b) it is permissible to use pain control even if, as I have said, it may bring the end closer, provided of course that it is used for pain control and not to hasten the end, even if that is the secondary effect.
Either we recognize, respect, revere God and give His Word dominion over us or we do not.
If we do fear God and submit to His dominion, we know He is the One whose Word begat (James 1:25) created, established, defined, redeems, restores, sustains (Hebrews 1:3), washes, gives life, sets the boundaries of life, faith, truth, love, reality for all eternity. We know this by revelation as we know that Jesus is Lord, Christ, Alpha and Omega, author and finisher of life, faith, everything.
Those who do not kneel to His Lordship and dominion live in the turbulence of the winds and waves, in the distortion, confusion, contradiction and destructiveness of fashions in philosophy, of hypothesis and limitations of science, of following their own or others choices, beliefs, feelings, hopes, dreams, ideas.
To be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace.