assisted suicide

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.”

Gallup just issued its annual poll on “moral acceptability.” I was struck by the dramatically different results in the two questions about suicide.

The first question asked about “doctor assisted suicide.” Close to a majority, 49 percent, of respondents answered that committing suicide with a doctor’s help is morally acceptable, while 45 percent responded that it is not.

The other question asked simply about the moral acceptability of “suicide.” Strikingly, only 21 percent said that it is morally acceptable to take one’s own life, while a whopping 70 percent said it is not. Indeed, suicide was one of the lowest “morally acceptable” behaviors in the entire poll. Only cloning humans, polygamy, and extramarital affairs had a lower moral acceptability rating.

That’s quite a paradox. So, what’s going on? Why the wide disparity in answering two questions that are about the same issue?

There is an old joke: What do you call the medical student who finished last in his class? Answer: “Doctor.”

The increasing legalization of assisted suicide has accorded that joke a disturbing pertinence. A doctor who prescribes poison need not be an excellent medical practitioner. He or she need not specialize in treating patients who present with particular life-threatening conditions, and indeed, can prescribe even if never treating the patient’s underlying condition at all.

For example, Jack Kevorkian was a pathologist who never treated a living patient after medical school. But if assisted suicide had been legal in his time, he would have been qualified to lethally prescribe. Along similar lines, before assisted suicide was legalized, the California death doctor Lonny Shavelson was a part-time ER doc who mostly pursued a career as a photojournalist and author.

In a newly released paper in the prestigious journal Bioethics, three prominent bioethicists argue that when someone decides to commit suicide via self-starvation and dehydration — known in euthanasia movement parlance as “voluntary stop eating and drinking” (VSED) — doctors should be allowed to “terminally sedate” the person trying to die when necessary to prevent intractable suffering. Patients who commit VSED are often not terminally ill. In fact, euthanasia organizations promote self-starvation to the elderly who are not dying and as a means of becoming eligible for assisted suicide where it is legal by making oneself “terminal” via lack of sustenance. VSED must be distinguished from the common circumstance when actively dying people stop eating. That’s a natural process and Read More ›

The other day, I wrote about Wendy Duffy, a healthy woman in deep grief because of the death of her son, who was planning to die at a Swiss death clinic. Alas, Duffy apparently did the deed. From the New York Post story: The physically healthy British mom, irreparably heartbroken over the death of her only son, died by euthanasia in Switzerland on Friday. Wendy Duffy, 56, died at the Pegasos assisted suicide clinic in Basel, in what the controversial organization called a “sane suicide,” the Daily Mail reported. “I can confirm that Wendy Duffy, at her own request, was assisted to die on April 24 and that the procedure was completed without incident and in full compliance with her Read More ›

A grieving mother who is in good health has been accepted for termination by a Swiss suicide clinic. From the New York Post story: A physically healthy British woman heartbroken over the death of her only son is heading to Switzerland to end her own life at an assisted suicide clinic. Wendy Duffy, 56, attempted to take her own life after her son died four years ago — but is soon bound for Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, after her application was accepted by a clinic, according to the London Times. Duffy, a former care worker from the West Midlands, told the Daily Mail that she paid Pegasos, a Swiss assisted-dying nonprofit organization, $13,500 to euthanize herself under its Read More ›

Assisted suicide is not discussed much at the federal level. But at a recent Senate committee hearing, Senator James Lankford (R., Okla.) asked HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about his thoughts on assisted suicide. Kennedy was unequivocal (starting at minute 3:30): Lankford: I want to switch to an issue we have not had a lot of time to talk about and that is assisted suicide. We now have three states, California, Colorado, and Vermont that disability groups are filing against some of the assisted suicide laws because it seems to target those with disabilities and the Americans with Disabilities Act passed in 1990, that act has worked to protect those with disabilities, not incentivize them to take their own Read More ›