Posted on 06/08/2006 6:56:30 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
ONE of Britain's leading experts on medical ethics has called for doctors to be able to end the lives of terminally ill patients — even if they have not given consent.
Len Doyal, professor of medical ethics at the University of London, has taken the euthanasia debate into new and highly contentious territory.
He says doctors should recognise they are already killing patients when they remove feeding tubes from those whose lives are judged to be no longer worth living. Some will suffer a "slow and distressing death" as a result. It would be better if their lives were ended "more quickly, more humanely and without guilt", Professor Doyal argues.
Critics said yesterday that the views of Professor Doyal were the "very worst form of medical paternalism".
Professor Doyal was a supporter of an assisted dying bill that would have allowed terminally ill patients to request a cocktail of drugs to end their lives. Opponents of the bill shelved it by voting for a postponement for further debate. But Professor Doyal is now taking the debate further.
He argues doctors are already effectively practising euthanasia by withdrawing life-saving treatment from patients who have no consciousness beyond the capacity to suffer pain.
He draws a parallel with a father who sees his baby drowning in the bath and fails to do anything to save it. He foresaw the certainty of the death and did nothing and would therefore be morally considered to have killed the child.
"Clinicians who starve severely incompetent patients to death are not deemed by law to have killed them actively, even if they begin the process by the removal of feeding tubes.
"The legal fiction that such starvation is not active killing is … clumsy judicial camouflage of the euthanasia that is occurring," Professor Doyal wrote.
His concern, he said, was not just with patients who were in a permanent vegetative state. "The category of patients that concerns me most are the patients where we are not sure. There is still some brain function, but they will never have any brain awareness or cognitive function, but they seem to be suffering."
Professor Doyal does not believe that legalising non-voluntary euthanasia for such patients would lead to more or inappropriate deaths.
"We have a situation where these decisions are being made all the time and yet we have no coherent system of regulation for them … We really don't know what is going on out there, as you do in Holland where all this is legal, or in Oregon where they have physician-assisted suicide.
"Where you have legalisation, you have the best data about what is going on because people are not afraid to report it."
Well, except for Terri Schiavo, who enjoyed her death immensely. Surely it would have been wrong to deny her all that joy.
And John Derbyshire applauds! Get rid of all those inconvenient terminally ill folks -- it's in their best interest...
This happens to be what the pro-life side has been saying all along. The pro-death camp has been claiming it's not really murder. Guess they were wrong when one of their own admits the truth here.
I thought that dying of dehydration was a euphoric experience.
"No consent for mercy deaths" ping.
This is the inevitable follow-on of disrespecting a patient's rights! If we deny the right to die, how can anyone claim a right to life...for surely a right to free speech includes a right to shut up, and a right to worship includes the freedom to choose not to.
When the Life-At-All-Costs crowd claims to know better than you what is right for you, who's to say the Deathers can't do the same?
oops... i.e., not e.g.
I am sure I heard the same thing. I even wonder why this is not used as the most humane method for capital punishment.
Put the crackpipe down. Back slowly away from the keyboard.
MM
Second that.
It seems for him having 'the best data' is the main objective of Ethics.
Thirded.
"We're here to get your liver."
You really shouldn’t assume that others share your vices.
Or was that just your way of distracting from your lack of factual, rational rebuttal to my points?
Please explain to me how a culture of supremely respecting patients' wishes and rights would be anything but the antithesis of what is presented in this article, which is involuntary euthanasia.
That's all the farther you have to read to know you are going to get a lecture on why dying is good for you.
I know you think you're coming across as an intellectual powerhouse making a brilliant, irrefutable point. You're not. It takes about two seconds of thought to see the obvious fallacy in your position, that fallacy being that the notion of "patient rights" is an all-or-none choice, a zero-sum game; a presumption that if one opposes involuntary euthanasia, that should automatically resolve into a the-patient-has-a-right-to-anything-and-everything position, which is silly on its face. It's perfectly reasonable to oppose involuntary euthanasia and voluntary euthanasia and the taking of an unborn child's life. I suspect that is the exact position held on these three issues by the majority of American citizens.
Over and out.
MM
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