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| A nursing home in Norway, Thomas Bjarkan, (Wiki..) |
by Louis Shalako
One of the foremost ethical dilemmas of the 21st century will be the question of euthanasia and assisted suicide.
Would you help someone to die if they asked you?
Would you help your own child to die if they were
terminally ill and their lives were nothing but an unremitting hell of
unbearable suffering?
Do we have the right to die on demand or to demand that on behalf of our children?
If we ourselves asked for an assisted suicide,
should our wish be granted?
After much controversy, Belgium has approved
euthanasia of children.
“"Why wouldn't you give children, who are
incurably sick and who are unbearably suffering the same possibilities adults
have?" asked Dr. Jan Bernheim from the research team for terminal care at
the Free University Brussels, speaking to DW before the law was approved.”
“In Belgium euthanasia implemented by doctors has
been legal for 11 years. Almost 1,432 elected to be euthanized in 2012 alone.” The population of Belgium is about 10.8 million.
“The debate over euthanasia has heated up over the
last few months after several spectacular cases emerged. In the October version
of the Belgian magazine ‘Panorama,’ TV journalist Dirk Leestmans reported on a
detainee who was granted the right to be euthanized.
“The inmate said the detention and the conditions in
jail had caused him extreme psychological suffering and he therefore wanted to
die. The case is still being reviewed by the courts. The inmate hasn't been
euthanized yet, but his request seems poised for approval.”
“This is not the only case that created an
international sensation. At the beginning of October, a 44-year old, going by
the name of Nathan, was euthanized after a failed sex change operation. He said
his wish to die was legitimate because of unbearable psychological suffering.”
“Carine Brochier of the European Institute of
Bioethics in Brussels says, ‘Family members, hospital staff and doctors
are extremely burdened by the euthanasia law.’”
"Euthanasia is not easy. It's not fun to kill
someone. Euthanasia is really killing and that's not good for the person doing
it, even if it is to kill suffering. It's also killing society," Brochier
said.
Euthanasia has been around for a long time. It’s
nothing new. It goes back to the Stone Age.
France is slowly moving towards assisted suicide.
“On the strength of the panel’s recommendations,
left-wing daily Libération expects the socialist government to
present a draft text by next summer, although widespread grassroots opposition
earlier this year to the legalization of same-sex “marriage” might make
president François Hollande wary of bringing yet another sensitive issue to the
fore.
“It is the President himself, however, who decided
last September to have the National Advisory Ethics Committee (CCNE) assemble a
representative panel of French citizens chosen by a commercial polling company,
IFOP, so that it could express ordinary people’s opinions on end of life. The
18 ‘sages’ gathered for four consecutive weekends in order to hear officially
mandated experts, many of them favorable to at least one form of voluntary
ending of life, including Jean-Luc Romero, president of the Association for the
right to die with dignity (ADMD).”
From the same story comes the following.
“’The possibility of committing suicide with medical
assistance, as well as assisted suicide, constitute in our view a legitimate
right of the patient who is in the end phase of his life or who is under the
burden of an irreversible pathology, a right which rests mainly on his informed
consent and full consciousness,’ they write.”
“In practice,
this would mean non-terminally but incurably ill patients – such as
tetraplegics – should be eligible for this type of assistance, which is in fact
akin to homicide.” (Life
Site News.)
(Tetriplegic is another term for quadriplegic. –
ed.)
The wording is significant, as it entails the right,
“…to obtain medical help in order to finish life with dignity.”
The B.C. Supreme Court upheld the province’s ban on assisted
suicide, which will now be appealed to the Supreme Court of
Canada. It’s important to see the distinctions.
Euthanasia is present in all societies. It is simply
not much talked about. It’s not exactly the same as assisted suicide.
A
friend’s dad was on a respirator after a major heart attack. A doctor
spoke with the family after two weeks and told them there wasn’t much hope for
recovery.
Under
Canadian law, patients or anyone who makes a will can specify that ‘no
extraordinary means’ will be used to keep them alive in the event of a major
medical event.
My
friend’s sister and mother could not bring themselves to do it. That left it up
to my friend, and there’s no doubt it affected him deeply. He and the doctor
put their hands on the switch at the same time.
They
turned the respirator off. His father died of complications resulting from a
heart attack. They have to put something as the cause of death on the official
death certificate. He was eighty-seven years old.
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| The end of a life. |
My own father suffered from Parkinson’s Disease and
after ten years, his condition was deteriorating on a daily and weekly basis.
He was having a lot of falls, and a lot of choking incidents, and his quality
of life was not very good. And yet he was prepared to continue living, which is
only normal—he would have very much liked it if medical science had found a
cure for Parkinson’s Disease. Whenever something happened, he would be
bedridden for some time, and then he seemed to be recovering, but never to the
level he had enjoyed before. That is a feature of Parkinson’s.
I got the call about six a.m. one morning. He’d had
some kind of problem, and he was in the hospital. His lungs were full of blood,
and he was unconscious, and yet with his eyes open, wide and staring at the
ceiling.
With my siblings all there, the doctor asked us what we wanted to do.
The sound of his breathing was horrifying. That
great body wanted to live, but Parkinson’s had killed him, or it was killing him.
Finally.
The doctor explained as we agonized.
“We can operate, but there’s no telling if we can
really do anything for him…or what would be left if he did regain
consciousness.” The doctor’s voice was calm and sympathetic, but he’d clearly
seen all of this before. “I can give him something to make him more comfortable—”
"So what are you trying to say, Doctor?"
"Your father is dying. Here, today, in this room. You need to understand that. It's really just a question of how long."
We decided that that was the thing to do—to give him
something to make him more comfortable, and my siblings left the room while I
took a turn, holding onto my father’s hand, and the nurse stuck a big ampoule
of something into him.
It’s hard. There’s nothing harder than easing your
loved one into the afterlife or the next world, which I don’t really believe
in.
I thought his breathing would just stop, and he kept
going. My siblings weren’t prepared to deal with this, and as the eldest I took a lot of responsibility for my father that day.
I was glad they were out of the room and didn’t have
to see this. My sister just couldn’t handle it and my younger brother wasn’t
much better.
It was a way of acknowledging my father, for all the
responsibility that he took for his children over the years.
It was the
right thing to do for a first-born son. He had expressed his wishes clearly for
us, and had signed the declaration while still of sound mind, although his body
was ravaged by the disease.
My father’s suffering was finally over, and there was nothing there to bring back. It would have done nothing more
than to extend his suffering. It’s not that I haven’t thought about it since.
What if we had gone ahead with an operation? He
might have lived another six weeks in a hospital bed, and the next medical
crisis would have killed him anyways. Why put him through that suffering, why
put the rest of the family through all that?
But to go against his wishes, clearly stated, would
be wrong. To keep him alive by extraordinary means would have been wrong.
There was no doubt my father was going to die—the
question was how long it would take. Three hours, three days, three weeks—it
was going to happen.
The four hours between the time I got the phone call
and the time he died was the toughest four hours of my life. When I think about
it, I sure wouldn’t want to take four hours when I die—
The really strange thing is that even with three
full ampoules of morphine in him, the body still kept drawing in those deep
racking, breaths, and that horrible drowning, sucking noise just kept going, on
and on.
At some point the nurses came into the room and
ushered me out. A few minutes later as I sat in a waiting room, one of them
came out and told me that my father was gone.
But that’s why there was more than one family member
and more than one medical person involved in the decision. No one should be
asked to shoulder that responsibility alone.
Euthanasia probably happens in the western world, it
happens in Canada and the U.S., and in every other developed nation that the
reader would care to name. It happens even more frequently in the undeveloped
world, out of natural human feelings of compassion and empathy.
It happens because it is a necessity, even though we
call it something else, palliative sedation.
 |
| (Jacob Windham, Wiki.) |
So Belgium’s decision to liberalize euthanasia,
certainly of the elderly, simply regularizes a situation that already exists,
it’s just that no one really wants to talk about it. It’s a serious subject and
a troubling one at that.
Those laws will benefit the survivors. It will take
some of the burden off of them, and the doctors, but with reasonable minds and
loving hearts, it will never be easy. To take the life of a suffering child,
even at the child’s own decision, would be ten times worse for all concerned.
We have to think of the living, their survivors, as
well in this debate.
It is certainly possible that there could and most likely would be abuses
under more liberalized euthanasia.
Euthanasia is different from palliative sedation,
and that is different from assisted suicide. It is a series of issues or
questions.
“Widespread support in Quebec for Bill 52, legislation
proposing to legalize ‘medical aid in dying,’ drops sharply when Quebecers are
told of the dire consequences similar statutes have brought in other countries,
a new poll has found.”
“In the poll, conducted by Abingdon Research from
October 24-26, respondents first gave their initial impressions of the
legislation and then gave their final impression after being asked their
opinion of various scenarios that have come up with similar legislation.”
“Scenarios included doctors killing elderly or
disabled people without their consent, doctors helping suicidal teens carry out
their deaths, or abusive family members pressuring the elderly to seek ‘medical
aid in dying.’”
These concerns are certainly valid, each to some degree, yet it's kind of sensationalized as well, and it’s amazing
how fast those poll results can change when the information changes and the
presentation changes. But it’s important for voters and citizens to be
well-informed and to think about a decision, whether legislative or in their
own personal life and circumstances.
“LifeCanada, the national pro-life educational group
that commissioned the poll, said the results show that support for Bill 52 is ‘a
mile wide but a foot deep.’”
That seems like fair comment, but then this is a
contentious issue—and respondents are sophisticated enough to know that. We
probably don’t spend enough time thinking about many of the political and
social issues of the day.
What’s interesting about the Canadian body politic
is that it’s not divided up solely on ideological grounds.
People really had to
scratch their heads a bit on this one.
In the twenty something years since the Sue
Rodriguez case, has Canada’s social landscape shifted?
A British Columbia group will ask the Supreme Court
that question. (National
Post.)
“Four months after the 1994 decision, Ms. Rodriguez
died by assisted suicide in her B.C. home. The procedure, a lethal injection, was
carried out illegally by an anonymous doctor.”
“’This is a matter of extreme urgency; the fate of
gravely ill Canadians hangs in the balance,’ said Grace Pastine, litigation
director for the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, which launched the case in 2011.”
There are some important distinctions to be made,
questions to be asked.
What is the difference between the merciful easing
of a terminally-ill elderly person into death, and the assisted-suicide of a
younger person whose ailment makes life unbearable or unliveable?
The ultimate
vacation: traveling to Switzerland, the world’s capital of
assisted suicide. (National Post.)
Disclaimer: Under Canadian Law it is an offence to
counsel to commit suicide, and it is an offence to harm yourself or to try to
harm yourself or to threaten to harm yourself. Few serious authors state otherwise.
This author still encourages families and friends to
ask themselves these questions, and to discuss them with each other, so that
last wishes are known, and actions are open and responsible so that the dying
may pass with dignity and so that the living can go on with their own lives
without fear and regret.
“No matter how ill a patient is, we never have a
right to put that person to death. Rather, we have a duty to care for and
preserve life.”
“But to what length are we required to go to
preserve life? No religion or state holds that we are obliged to use every
possible means to prolong life. The means we use have traditionally been
classified as either ‘ordinary’ or ‘extraordinary.’”
“Ordinary" means must always be used. This is
any treatment or procedure which provides some benefit to the patient without
excessive burden or hardship.”
“’Extraordinary’ means are optional. These are
measures which do present an excessive burden.”
The only thing I learned from all of this is that it really is a slippery slope.
END
Additional
Resources.
Living
Will. The living will should also provide some direction
for end of life wishes, including a statement of whether the loved on would or
would not prefer ‘extraordinary means’ to continue life in the absence of any
real hope of recovery.
