Some claim that palliative care, combined with psychological and spiritual support, can address all the problems of all dying patients. This ignores a clinical reality, in which some patients, despite the best palliative care, still have bad deaths, with some resorting to dreadful journeys to Dignitas to end their suffering. International experience also confirms that palliative care and assisted dying are not either/or options. For the last ten years, assisted dying has been legal in Oregon under the Death with Dignity Act. Of the 50 states of the USA, Oregon has amongst the best palliative care and nearly 90 per cent of those seeking assisted dying do so from within those services.
The claims that assisted dying would inhibit the development of palliative care services, and would break down trust between doctors and patients, are unsupported by international evidence. So, too, are nightmare scenarios conjured by opponents in which decriminalisation of assisted dying places us on a slippery slope that would lead to the involuntary euthanasia of people who do not want to die. The Dutch experience, frequently misrepresented by those against assisted dying, has shown how liberalisation of the law has the reverse effect. Rates of non-voluntary euthanasia (i.e. doctors actively ending patients’ lives without having been asked by them to do so) have decreased. The present clinical, ethical and legal fudge in the UK, where some patients’ deaths are hastened with no regulatory framework, is more dangerous.
Even more absurd is the claim that to accede to someone’s request for assisted dying is to devalue human life….
Very frightening. These folks will kill us. And they think nothing about imposing their ideas and beliefs on others. Indeed they seem to have the only infallible worldview. And the presuppose that fallible people can create an infallible system
“Even more absurd is the claim that to accede to someone’s request for assisted dying is to devalue human life….”
Well, my friend, I can surely tell you one thing: for me to ‘accede’ to end someone else’s life – – – essentially, to murder someone — would certainly devalue MY life, for me!
Yet we Christians are the dangerous fanatics in their eyes.
No matter what noble arguments are used to support euthanasia I can’t help but suspect that in the end the reasons will be as arbitrary as the ones given for abortion. The sad thing is if it follows, economy and the “inconvenience” the elderly, disabled and chronically ill impose on their families will be arguments in defense of assisted dying.
Quality of life will no longer be applied only to the patient but to the life of those in charge of his day to day care. If your family can not take that vacation to New Zealand that they have saved for and dreamed of for years because they have to pay for your chemo and you require round the clock care you will be a candidate for assisted dying.
But let’s face it at that point you would no longer qualify for personhood and its protections so why shouldn’t somebody else have the right to terminate you?
I remember reading an article in an Australian published Bioethics journal that indicated that the Dutch evidence was extremely worrying – the actual numbers were being hidden by classifying them differently, with a simply huge explosion of deaths in a couple of other categories. And that when that was taken into account the ‘worst case’ kind of scenario appears to be what is happening there.