Euthanasia

The other day, in response to the British Medical Association requiring doctors to participate in VSED (voluntary stop eating and drinking) suicides, I wrote that “suicide nihilism is exerting an ever-increasing gravitational force.” With this post, I double down on that depressing conclusion.

Hospice was designed to care for people who are diagnosed with terminal illnesses until their natural deaths. But a study just published in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management — the publication of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine — argues that people intending to commit suicide via VSED should qualify for hospice care even if they are not otherwise dying!

What? Why? Because someone dying within six months qualifies for hospice. VSED takes less than that amount of time to die. Hence, such suicidal people should be admitted to hospice. The mind just boggles.

The subtitle of the revised and updated version of my book criticizing utilitarian bioethics, Culture of Death, is, “The Age of ‘Do Harm’ Medicine.” Helping patients kill themselves by self-starvation and dehydration — known in euthanasia parlance as VSED (for voluntary stopping eating and drinking) — certainly fits that designation.

Two major medical associations now have endorsed doctors assisting in such suicides by palliating the painful symptoms to help patients go all the way to death. The first was the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine (AAHPM) in 2023. This is especially notable because the organization shamefully went “neutral” on the legalization of assisted suicide, despite that action being the antithesis of the hospice philosophy enunciated by the great medical humanitarian Dame Cecily Saunders. The AAHPM’s journal also published a piece recently endorsing intentionally undernourishing dementia patients under certain conditions (MCF, or “minimal comfort feeding”) — VSED in slow motion, if you will.

Now, another “do harm” shoe has dropped. The British Medical Association has issued an ethical guidance that requires practitioners to participate in VSED when asked to do so by a patient. While the AAHPM guidance assumes that the act will only be done by terminally ill or seriously ill or disabled patients, the BMA guidance notably acknowledges that even those not in ill health can kill themselves in this slow manner — and that doctors must further the suicide palliatively. From the guidance (my emphasis):

The Washington Post has a heartwarming story about a Nashville cop who dissuaded a suicidal man from jumping off a bridge:

“It was emotional. This was an individual who had reached a level of frustration where he was having the worst day of his life,” Hotz said. “I just wanted to be able to develop trust with him and help him realize that tomorrow is another day and it will get better.”

“It was a combination of life circumstances that happened that brought him to a level of ultimate frustration and desperation,” Hotz said.

Even as they talked, Hotz said he remained afraid of what might happen next.…

“He was standing on the bridge and did lean over several times,” he said.

New York just legalized assisted suicide. Adding insult to injury, the law requires morally or religiously objecting doctors to be complicit in assisted suicides by cooperating with some of its provisions. Specifically, the Medical Aid in Dying Act requires that the “attending physician” of patients requesting assisted suicide perform specified functions before patients can be prescribed lethal substances, with no apparent opt-out in the law that I could discern for physicians who are morally or religiously opposed to such a request. These mandatory actions include examining the patient to determine whether the illness is terminal, referring the patient to a consulting doctor to approve the assisted suicide, and discussing the “potential risks associated with taking the medication” (among others), the Read More ›

The West continues its love affair with the culture of death as the French National Assembly just voted to legalize euthanasia and assisted suicide, overriding the Senate’s rejection. I haven’t read the bill, but here are a few notes I discerned from various media reports: Please remember that the law as it currently exists will surely not be the permanent ceiling of permissibility, but as other jurisdictions illustrate, merely be the launching pad for an ever more expansive euthanasia regime. Moreover, even these weak-tea parameters will probably not be enforced meaningfully, because that’s how the culture of death rolls. And once euthanasia starts, it picks up steam year by year as hastened death becomes normalized. The constitutionality of the law Read More ›

Assisted suicide legalization is bad medicine and even worse public policy. It abandons the sick, destroys human equality by creating a killable caste of people, and cheapens the intrinsic dignity of human life. Moreover, the supposed “strict safeguards” are neither strict — for example, relying on doctor self-reporting — nor particularly protective. Besides, as soon as the law goes into place, the safeguards are quickly redefined as “obstacles” to a good death and the process of loosening the law commences.

These and other myriad problems have gotten the attention of Senators James Lankford (R., Okla.) and Tim Kaine (D., Va.), who along with two representatives sent a letter to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. asking for oversight over the practice in the hospice context. Among their expressed concerns (citations omitted):

• “There are grave informed consent issues within physician-assisted suicide. Patients spend little time with the physician providing physician-assisted suicide relative to the course of their disease.”

The legalization of assisted suicide/euthanasia corrupts medical ethics and not just because killing patients or assisting their suicides is a direct violation of the Hippocratic oath. No: Transforming sick and disabled people into a killable caste also objectifies them as potential natural resources to be mined or harvested.

Hastened death and organ-harvesting have already been conjoined in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium. (In the latter two countries, some cases have involved mentally ill patients.) The practice has been supported in prominent medical journals. It is not alarmism to note that the idea is gaining ever wider acceptance among the medical and bioethics intelligentsia.

But killing and then harvesting doesn’t go far enough for some mainstream bioethicists. Where euthanasia is legal, they don’t see why organ procurement can’t also be the means of death for patients who want to donate. In other words, don’t just kill and then harvest; harvest to kill.

The Anglican Church of Canada has authorized clergy to bless people being euthanized just before, during, and after being lethally jabbed (when permitted by the bishop). From “Pastoral Liturgies at the Time of Death in Contexts of Medically Assisted Dying”: It is not our intent to enter into the ethical arguments regarding MAiD, nor to provide a moral argument for or against MAiD.…No matter where people are in their life journey, we as a Christian community and Christian leaders in particular are called to respond pastorally to the needs and concerns of the people before us. Wherever the church serves, we are the Body of Christ reaching out to the suffering, the sick, and the dying. When someone reaches out Read More ›

The media is (properly) reporting that a Dutch doctor euthanized — i.e. killed — a sick twelve-year-old child (illness not reported). It is a “first” under a new Dutch law that allows euthanasia for children ages one to twelve. From the story in The Independent: In a latter to parliament, Dutch health minister Sophie Hermans said that the child had died last year but did not clarify their age, date of death or the illness that they suffered, according to broadcaster NOS. The law in the Netherlands was changed in 2014 to extend euthanasia to children under the age of 12 to allow them to “die with dignity” if there was no route to escape extremely severe pain or suffering. Read More ›

What happens to a society when it starts killing its elderly? What happens when a doctor offers death to a lonely senior before offering treatment? When a grandchild loses a grandparent not to disease, but to euthanasia? When aging parents begin to wonder whether they’re a burden rather than a gift? In Canada, euthanasia now accounts for approximately 1 in 20 deaths, and the program continues to expand. What began as a narrowly defined option for a small group of patients has become one of the most controversial bioethical issues of our time. In this powerful and deeply human conversation, Amanda Achtman, founder of Dying to Meet You, explains why euthanasia is not merely a medical issue, but an existential Read More ›