Posted on 02/26/2007 4:16:01 PM PST by madprof98
“Choice” my foot: If the new bill to legalize assisted suicide in California (A.B. 374) becomes law, Catholic nursing homes will be legally required to permit assisted suicide to be committed within their premises, even though doing so would be a profound violation of Catholic moral teaching. In-patient hospice facilities would be similarly coerced, despite assisted suicide being a direct affront to the hospice philosophy and the medical standards under which programs operate. Other California medical facilities and group homes could also be forced to comply. Only acute-care hospitals escape the proposed tyrannical duty to cooperate in ending patients’ lives.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Assisted-suicide advocates are a voracious lot. They claim that their policy goals are modest, a mere tweaking, if you will, of medical ethics and protocols. Being zealots, however, they often try to sneak coercive provisions into their various legalization proposals. A.B. 374 is patterned generally after the law in Oregon, though the coercion about which I write is not found in the current Oregon law or a concurrently introduced assisted-suicide legalization bill in Vermont, and is an attempt to force most medical and nursing facilities to cooperate in the assisted-suicide regime.
The duty is imposed obliquely, one might even say by stealth. Here’s how it is done: The relevant sections are 7198 (b) and (e), which would be added to the California Health and Safety Code if A.B. 374 becomes law:
7198 (b): No professional organization or association, or heath care provider, may subject a person to censure, discipline, suspension, loss of license, loss of privileges, loss of membership, or other penalty for participating or refusing to participate in good faith compliance with this chapter. (My emphasis.)
Here’s the sneaky part: Subsection (e) permits acute-care hospitals to refuse to permit assisted suicide in the facility.
(e) Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a general acute care hospital, as defined in subdivision (a) of Section 1250, may prohibit a licensed physician from carrying out a patient’s request under this chapter on the premises of the hospital if the hospital has notified the licensed physician of its policy regarding this chapter.
Under 1250 (a), an acute-care hospital is defined as “a health facility having a duly constituted governing body with overall administrative and professional responsibility and an organized medical staff that provides 24-hour inpatient care, including the following basic services: medical, nursing, surgical, anesthesia, laboratory, radiology, pharmacy, and dietary services.” Thus, nursing homes, hospices, and other such facilities would not qualify for the exemption provided acute-care hospitals under 7198 (e), since they do not have laboratories or pharmacies on-site, provide surgical medical services, etc.
By explicitly identifying acute-care hospitals as the only facilities where assisted suicides can be prevented from taking place on-site, the legislation must be construed to require that all other health-care facilities cooperate with assisted suicide—whether or not they have religious, moral, or philosophical objections. Nor could these facilities sanction or discipline staff doctors or other personnel who agree to participate in on-site assisted suicides of patients.
If A.B. 374 becomes law, Catholic and other religiously oriented nursing homes will be forced to choose between shutting down, selling, or cooperating in assisted suicide. That this could cause untold misery for thousands of helpless sick and elderly people matters to its authors not a whit. The culture of death brooks no dissent.
Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and a special consultant to the Center for Bioethics and Culture. He is currently researching a book on the animal-liberation movement.
This can be done tastefully and with an eye toward upholding the dignity and honor of the hospital of course.
I am sure there are many who can work out the details so no fingers can be pointed.
I get tired of hearing Catholic medical care facilities whining about not be allowed to impose their theology on their patients, while they're relying overwhelmingly on taxpayer funds to run these places, and actively marketing their services to non-Catholic patients (and in many cases, not making clear up front what the implications of their Catholic affiliation are, or even making sure the patients know the facility is Catholic-affiliated). If Catholic facilities want to run their operations according to Catholic theology, let them do it with Catholic money. I'm not paying taxes so that some old lady can be forced to stay alive against her will while stuck in a facility I'm paying for.
Ping.
But, of course, you'd gladly pay for "free" abortions, wouldn't you? You and Rudy.
Another liberal is conservtive clothing. We you rooting for Michael Schiavo too?
I would gladly pay for them personally, but would much prefer that ALL medical care be privately funded -- not just controversial things. Until then, facilities and medical professionals who are being paid to any material degree out of taxpayer funds should be required to provide all services which are legal. I don't want to land in an emergency room where a bunch of Jehovah's Witnesses are being paid out of taxpayer funds while refusing to do blood transfusions because they believe it's a terrible "sin". Taxpayer funds shouldn't be used to force people to practice tenets of a religion which they don't believe in.
Actually, most of Catholic facilities are fairly obvious by their names if are able to read.
I'm pretty sure most religions take a dim view of murder, so it's not exactly "Catholic theology."
Actually, no. There was no possible harm in letting Terri's parents and siblings take her home and care for her AT THEIR OWN EXPENSE (which is what they were offering to do). She had left no written will, and the only person claiming she'd expressed a wish not to be kept alive under such circumstances was her "husband" who obviously had multiple reasons to want her dead. The only objective evidence of Terri's wishes was that she had been a practicing Catholic, and continuing to provide food/water when that's all that was needed to keep her alive, was consistent with the teachings of her faith. If, as all the advocates of withdrawing her sustenance asserted (and I think they were right), she had no consciousness whatsoever, then there was no possible harm in allowing her family to take her home and care for her in accordance with her (and their) religious beliefs. If her parents and siblings were correct in believing that she had some consciousness and wanted to be with them, then obviously allowing that to happen was the only route consistent with liberty.
Michael Schiavo is the ultimate poster child for the "get government out of marriage" principle. Government should not recognize, define, regulate, or license marriage, which a purely social and religious institution. Michael Schiavo's ONLY claim to have any standing to interfere with medical decisions for Terri was that according to the government, they were "married", and according to the government "marriage" automatically carries a whole pile of legal baggage that are imposed on the parties to the marriage whether they like it or not, and whether or not they were even aware of them all when they got "married". Government regulation of "marriage" trumped Terri's publicly professed religious beliefs. We are supposed to have freedom OF religion in this country, not freedom FROM religion, and the outcome in the Terri Schiavo case was not consistent with that principle.
By no means do all religions regard assisted suicide as "murder", and there are quite a lot of people who do not subscribe to any religion at all.
There have been a lot of acquisitions of hospitals, and probably other facilities as well, by Catholic medical care organizations, in which the name of the hospital isn't changed. An electrician who worked for me told me how he'd ended up with more children than he could support without working overtime on Saturdays (which he was doing at my house for a while) instead of spending weekends with his family. After baby number 2, he and wife were asked at the hospital if she wanted to have her tubes tied. They had two boys and decided they wanted to have one more child in hopes of getting a girl, but no more, so they said no and planned to do it after number 3. So they go to the same hospital to deliver number 3 and after all has gone well with the delivery, they say she wants her tubes tied. "Sorry, we won't do that, we're a Catholic hospital now", they were told. So while saving up for a vasectomy, number 4 came along.
Nursing homes, by their very nature, have many patients who were not mentally sound enough to be analyzing the policies of various facilities when the time came that they needed to enter one.
"When in the Course of human events..."
The Crimes of the King were teapot tempests compared to this obsenity.
Well, GovernmentShrinker, there are some problems with what you advocate. I've excerpted a bit of it.
On abortion, you wrote: "I would gladly pay for them personally, but would much prefer that ALL medical care be privately funded -- not just controversial things."
ALL medical care?
Really?
What about indigent care. You know, people who don't have the money? All old people are on Medicare, so if we pull Medicare and require old retirees to fund their OWN medical care, given that hardly any CAN, what do we do? Let them die?
That's what it comes down to with Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the indigent: either we publicly fund it, or we let the sick die. That also applies to virtually any young couple with a seriously sick infant, a baby with cancer or water on the brain, that sort of thing. Virtually nobody in that age range has the millions of dollars it takes to save those children. So, do we let the children die, or do we accept that having taxation and government-provided health care for people who cannot pay is by far the lesser evil when compared with simply letting people perish. Your plan would certainly shrink the population and reduce the average life span of the population...if you could ever get it passed...which you couldn't, because most Americans have a conscience and would not follow a philosophy of dollars-uber-alles to the logical, inevitable, wretched conclusion you have proposed.
The simple choice is between mass death of the elderly and the death of virtually all gravely ill children, or government subsidies of health care. You want the former. We've chosen the latter. Our position is the more moral one.
And then you wrote this:
"Government should not recognize, define, regulate, or license marriage, which a purely social and religious institution."
Hmmmmm. What is government, if it's not a social institution?
But beyond that, what do we do about children? There is no dispute that children raised by two parents in a stable committed relationship are the ones who statistically turn out the best overall. If men and women cannot bind themselves to each other in a legally recognizable and privileged way, it becomes mighty difficult to maintain that permanent, bonded relationship, given the structure of our society, with its taxation and health insurance and educational demands.
Every man for himself will screw the kids royally, and the adults too, when they're old.
Please. Vasectomies are outpatient and not that expensive. If he wanted a vasectomy and it was a high priority for them it could have been done somewhere else.
They can try all they like but as a physician I will never do an abortion nor assist someone with suicide. That is a promise.
If the had the money for the tubal they definately had the money for the vasectomy by a long shot. Something in the story just does not add up. They could have had the tubal somewhere else within a week. Or were they on MEDICAID.
Their insurance would have covered the tubal, at least if it was done while she was hospitalized for the delivery. Apparently wasn't covered as a standalone procedure -- probably because it's more expensive that way.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
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