Despite “death with dignity” rhetoric, involuntary euthanasia is the ultimate goal
By Jennifer Popik, JD, Robert Powell Center for Medical Ethics
Jukka Varelius
A new journal article from
Bioethics, “On the Moral
Acceptability of Physician‐Assisted Dying for Non‐Autonomous Psychiatric
Patients,” author Jukka Varelius openly makes the case that assisting
suicide should be expanded to those who suffer from any kind of mental
distress – even those who never request it,
Given that the distress a
psychiatric patient undergoes can be very severe and that there may not
always be adequate means of alleviating it (short of ending the
patient’s life), the idea that psychiatric-assisted dying could
sometimes be morally acceptable does merit attention. Yet it would seem
that the suffering experienced by psychiatric patients who lack autonomy
can be as bad as the distress that autonomous, or rational, psychiatric
patients undergo, if not worse. Accordingly, it can be asked why
physician-assisted dying should be limited to the cases of autonomous or
rational patients, if it is endorsed in psychiatry. [internal citations omitted]
While this argument might seem shocking, particularly to those lives
that have been touched by suicide and mental illness, it is what our
near neighbors in Canada have just legalized, and it is exactly what the
endgame is for the nation’s leading euthanasia promotion organization,
Compassion and Choices (C&C).
C &C, formerly the Hemlock Society, is responsible for the
promotion of dangerous laws to permit state sanctioned suicide. Upon the
heels of a major euthanasia victory in California, it will no doubt use
the newly enacted assisting suicide law to motivate death advocates and
influence legislators.
While over 25 states did not advance legislation this year, we can be
sure stronger efforts will be made in the next legislative session.
As part of a calculated effort believing that Americans are not yet
ready for widespread euthanasia, C&C currently promotes carving out
state laws that allow doctors to write lethal prescriptions to patients
who request one so long as some illusory “safeguards” are followed. This
kind of assisting suicide is legal in 4 states, California, Oregon,
Washington and Vermont.* In the two states living under this law the
longest, Oregon and Washington, provide evidence that safeguards are not
working is mounting.
There are state-issued reports that provide evidence of
non-terminally ill persons receiving lethal prescriptions. Further,
there is
nothing in existing law in any state that
requires doctors to refer patients for evaluation by a psychologist or
psychiatrist to screen for depression or mental illness. There is also
no such requirement in any current proposal in any state.
The doctors can make a referral, but nearly never do. In fact,
according to the Oregon’s official state reports, in 17 years of
legalized doctor-prescribe suicide, a mere 5.5% of death candidates have
been referred for psychological evaluation.
In short, there is evidence that no so-called “safeguards” work. What
is worse, this is exactly what C&C President Barbara Coombs Lee
wants. She would prefer to expand the list of those who can receive
lethal drugs to any kind of discomfort a person might believe she or he
is suffering from.
In the
USA Today article, “Half of U.S. states consider
right-to-die legislation,” Coombs Lee told reporter Malak Monir, “It’s
not as simple as pain.
Everyone gets to identify their own definition of suffering.” (emphasis added)
In another telling remark, Coombs Lee congratulated our close
neighbors in Canada on its astounding Supreme Court decision that allows
euthanasia for virtually any reason, and possibly for people whose
wishes are unknown. In a press release she wrote, “We are heartened, as
availability of aid in dying in Canada will have an impact here,
especially in border states like New York and Maine.”
The situation in Canada is bleak. On February 6, 2015, the Supreme
Court of Canada unanimously found a constitutional right to “termination
of life” for anyone who has an “irremediable medical condition” and
wants to die.
Unlike doctor-prescribed suicide laws in California, Oregon,
Washington, and Vermont that theoretically are limited to those with
terminal illness, the sweeping ruling allows killing any Canadian who
“has a grievous and irremediable medical condition (including an
illness, disease or disability) that causes enduring suffering that is
intolerable to the individual in the circumstances of his or her
condition.”
So while you might not live in either Canada, or in one of the states
where doctor-prescribed suicide is legal, if more states join the ranks
of California, Oregon, Washington, and Vermont, — and above all if 2016
sees the election of a president and Senate likely to use the next
Supreme Court vacancy to nominate and confirm a Justice sympathetic to
euthanasia–there is the real risk that in the future the U.S. Supreme
Court might well follow Canada’s in holding there is a federal
Constitutional right to assist suicide.
Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has called assisting suicide “an appropriate right to have.”
If the Court were to follow Canada’s example, such a ruling might
not, even nominally, apply the right only to the “terminally ill.”
Instead it could include anyone who “has a grievous and irremediable
medical condition (including an illness, disease or disability) that
causes enduring suffering that is intolerable to the individual.”**
Indeed, as in Canada and as argued in the journal
Bioethics,
the same opinion might suggest that “surrogates” can direct the killing
of children with disabilities, those with mental illness, or older
people with Alzheimer’s who have never asked to die but are deemed
incompetent to decide for themselves.
No one should suppose that the death advocates will stop with
voluntary or even non-voluntary euthanasia. Involuntary euthanasia is an
ultimate goal. In a book published in 1998, Derek Humphry, the founder
of the Hemlock Society (a predecessor of Compassion and Choices), wrote
supportively of the use of assisting suicide as “one measure of cost
containment.”
“[T]he elderly,” he wrote, are “putting a strain on the health care
system that will only increase and cannot be sustained.” Speaking of
people with disabilities, Humphry wrote, “People with chronic conditions
account for a disproportionately large share of health care use, both
services and supplies.”
He wrote of recognizing a “duty to die” and invoked the precedent of
hospital ethics committees that, then as now, routinely deny life-saving
medical treatment, and even assisted feeding, against the will of
patients and their surrogates. Other death advocates have made similar
predictions of the need to require that the burdensome with a low
quality of life be given lethal prescriptions against their will.
It would be foolish to understate the magnitude of the impact of
California’s decision. But it may be hoped that the gravity of this
defeat will shock and energize those who recognize that you don’t solve
problems by killing those to whom the problems happen.
Instead it may cause us to redouble our efforts to block further
expansion of the culture of death and, above all, to prevent the
election of a president and senators who will use every available
opportunity to entrench it irreversibly.
*Assisting suicide may have some legal immunity in the state of Montana, due to a state Supreme Court decision.
** “Irremediable,” the Canadian Supreme Court stressed, “does not
require the patient to undertake treatments that are not acceptable to
the individual.” Thus, as in the Netherlands, a depressed patient who
rejects treatment for the depression has a “right” to be killed.
Source: NRLC News
It
seems almost impossible that the time has flown by this quickly, but
it’s been nearly two years since Jahi McMath suffered a cardiac arrest
following routine surgery and was soon after declared brain-dead.
This is the last NRL News Today post for the week and let me give you a heads-up: it concerns a piece that ran on a prominent pro-abortion website, 
Oh,
you mean you feared you might feel a tinge of compassion for the child
whose body has just been torn apart? Nah, not a chance.
In
a nutshell, while the recent Democratic debate was rather boring, I
watched on the chance that the biased, pro-abortion media who panders to
candidates on the left would ask a challenging question, exposing the
extreme position of each of the Democratic presidential candidates on
abortion.
Elsewhere
today we post about an interview Gloria Steinem gave to Yahoo Global
Anchor Katie Couric in which she insists to the former CBS News anchor that abortion is “a profoundly moral decision.” Indeed, we learn that Steinem dedicated her most recent book–My Life On The Road— “to John Sharpe, the doctor who helped her get an abortion in 1957.”
We
are now into Video #11 in the ongoing undercover investigation of
Planned Parenthood and so-called Tissue Procurement Companies–the ones
that are the middlemen between the abortion clinics and the researchers
eager to experiment on intact baby body parts.
My, how things can change, how life (and the fate of the purveyors of death) can turn on a dime.
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