Trouble in Assisted Suicide Paradise

Just as there are botched abortions, statistics are now revealing that there are botched assisted suicides. What a surprise.  Newly released annual reports from Washington and Oregon in 2009, show there were 2 or 3 complications in Washington and 1 in Oregon. 

 

Compassion and Choices, a non-profit group, is the leading euthanasia group in the United States. This group sends volunteers to support and monitor patients using the law to kill themselves. They are quoted as saying, "We're concerned, because we want this to work well and properly," said Dr. Tom Preston, a retired Seattle cardiologist, who serves as Compassion's medical director in Washington.

 

Wow! I think Dr. Preston blurred the distinction between healer and killer. Hippocrates might be rolling over in his grave. After all, in the year 500 BC, he separated the role of the physician from killer to  healer. "Do no harm" might be a good thing for Dr. Preston to reflect upon.

 

What problems? Well, one patient took the lethal prescription, vomited up part of it because he had drunken 6 cans of Pepsi, his favorite drink, in the hours before taking the drug. Talk about zombies. Another case in Washington, was with a terminally ill woman, who swallowed the drug too slowly, because she kept stopping to say goodbye to the people around her. She fell asleep after drinking less than half of the full cocktail, then awakened before finally dying. The problem with the two cases, Dr. Preston said, "The patient refused to have a physician or trained Compassion volunteer present, to make sure proper procedures were followed. Compassion counsels patients not to eat 4 to 5 hours before, and to take an anti-nausea drug an hour ahead of time; not to take laxatives or ingest acidic beverages; to drink water or soda only at room temperature, and to say goodbye 1st, then drink the lethal cocktail all at once.

 

Oregon reported a patient last year, who took a record 104 hours to die. Reports are that the patient had a strong heart. Madam DeFarge would recommend we bring back the guillotine. It was certainly much more compassionate. The Queen of Hearts in Alice of Wonderland would back up M. DeFarge by announcing, "Off with their heads!" 

 

All kidding aside, this is gruesome. First of all medicine should do no harm. In the Hippocratic Oath, probably a thing of the past, a physician swears to give no deadly medicine. Why are we making suicide cosmetically compassionate? Why not treat for depression? Why are we making suicide an out for a vulnerable society? Where will it stop? Will we be having suicide clinics in schools, for kids who did not get asked to the prom? If we are a compassionate society, we take care of those who cannot take care of themselves. We don't kill them. And we don't pass laws that allow it.