8mm
Posted on 02/24/2008 12:57:30 PM PST by wagglebee
KENNEWICK -- Former Washington state Governor Booth Gardner launched a campaign last month to legalize assisted suicide. Today, Wesley Smith spoke at St. Joseph's Church to tell people why euthanasia is wrong.
Smith was able to convince some people in his audience that assisted suicide is the wrong way to go for terminally ill patients.
"When people first hear about it, they might think it's a decent idea, but when they learn the reasonings and what it could lead to, education has really changed me to another direction," said Julia Hiatt, who heard Smith's speech today.
Smith used his own father's experience with death as an example ... saying he had a chance to grow right before he passed.
"I had a couple of grandparents in similar situations and if this was legalized they would've been killed and they wouldn't be able to meet my children or experience the last tenderness of life," Hiatt said.
Smith says advocates of assisted suicide are abandoning terminally ill patients during a time they need the most support and love.
"When you say to somebody that wants to kill themselves, yes we think your life isn't worth living, you're validating their worst fears, their fears they'll be a burden, not worthy of being loved anymore, worrying about being allowed to die in pain," Smith said.
Smith adds that euthanasia is causing problems countries where it's been legal for years. For example, the Netherlands.
Assisted suicide has been legal there since 1973.
"Dutch doctors have gone from euthanizing terminally ill people who ask for it to even babies who are born with disabilities and people who are depressed. It was just created as a constitutional right for the mentally ill to have assisted suicides," Smith said.
The "death with dignity" measure allows mentally competent adults diagnosed with six months or less to live to ask for assistance to end their lives. Former Governor Gardner needs 225,000 signatures by July to place the initiative on the November ballot.
Oregon enacted the assisted suicide law in 1997. It's the only state to legalize euthanasia. Between 1997 and 2005, close to 250 terminally ill patients have chosen to end their lives.
This is a very sad truth.
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At the risk of being asked to surrender my conservative badge, I have come to believe that assisted suicide by suspension of treatment is appropriate under some circumstances. And, that springs from my belief that this life is but a stopover on a much longer journey by some part of us.
I have prepared the appropriate documents, and made my entire family aware, so that my wishes can direct their actions in the event I’m unable to communicate on my own behalf.
If my life has deteriorated to the point that I can no longer care for myself, and that my continued survival is wholly dependent on the assistance of others, and my awareness or consciousness is no longer apparent or discoverable, and that there is no reasonable assumption that I will ever regain my faculties, then I wish that treatments and nutritional support be suspended and that my caregivers transfer their efforts to palliative care only, and that I be allowed to slip away into whatever comes next.
I am not troubled by this decision, nor this directive, because it is consistent with my moral beliefs.
Others need to make this decision on their own, and make their wished known to those who may be chaged with their care at some point in the future. The time to address this issue is when you are capable of deciding for yourself; not when you can no longer communicate.
I see a middle ground.
Hospice and nursing home care in the US are egregiously expensive, and there is a willingness to humiliate life with technology when the time is ripe to pass.
The solution to both problems might be found in Mexico.
In the future, people in need of expensive, long term or hospice care, may travel to American-designed medical communities down South. There they can find English speaking, competent health care workers and reasonably good medical care that will not impoverish their family. We can hope it exists for this reason alone.
But the Mexican environment itself may also solve the problem of either forcing death, or degrading people by grotesquely and unnaturally extending the bare minimum of what passes for life.
It is not euthanasia to allow a grievously ill person to die, when only extraordinary means could be used to perhaps keep their heart beating beyond when it tries to stop, though there is no life left within them.
And there is the added benefit that instead of emotionally sterile medical facilities, such a community in Mexico could be filled with comfort, attention and faith. Instead of becoming a non-person at the end of life, they could be embraced by a deeply religious community devoted to honoring their lives and passing as more than just garbage disposal.
Would it be better that instead of the cold and impersonal human warehouses used for the elderly in America, where rows of mostly wheelchair bound old women stare at the wall or sleep for most of the day; instead to go to a place where a family would have as their purpose to take care of her, and treat her with the dignity, affection and respect of a matriarch?
Surely this would be a better choice for most of us. And when death comes, but without a heart needle full of adrenaline, electroshock, a respirator and lots of other drugs, it just comes. As it comes to all.
You are fairly new here, so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. But you need to know that Free Republic is a pro-life, conservative forum.
What they are talking about doing in Washington state, and what they currently do in Oregon, is to allow doctors to take deliberate actions that can ONLY result in death. This is the same slippery slope that they got on in the Netherlands some time ago and there they now allow euthanasia for people who are merely depressed.
Plus it needs to be understood what "extraordinary means" refers to. A feeding tube IS NOT an extraordinary means, it is a medical devise that has been used for centuries, its use predates nearly all medical practices that we view as routine today.
Perhaps if you read the rest of what I wrote, not focusing on a single sentence to determine what you think I meant to say, you would see that by my definition, extraordinary means extraordinary.
Especially with such a serious, and emotional issue, one should not be quick to judge.
Aside from a respirator (in certain circumstances), I don't consider anything else you mentioned to be extraordinary.
Especially with such a serious, and emotional issue, one should not be quick to judge.
Then why did you bring up money? I have noticed that pro-death apologists nearly always bring up medical costs at some point.
However, shouldn't our Creator be allowed to determine when we continue on that journey?
We are not just talking about extraordinary life support, we are talking about physicians taking deliberate actions that can ONLY result in the patient's death.
Because money means a lot to people who want long term nursing care, not exclusively to those in critical condition. The vast majority of people who would want to go to Mexico would do so because they could find the level of care they needed and wanted, but without they and their families being wiped out. They could live there for many years with high quality care.
Right now, many people suffer because they can no longer afford nursing care in the US, their funds having run out, and must exist in poverty level care.
Now that being said, one the things I mentioned as “extraordinary measures”, I included a respirator, but I would not typically call that extraordinary by itself, because lots of patients need a respirator (and I’ll note that America has a perpetual and dangerous shortage of them).
Instead, I’ll define “extraordinary” as a *combination* of things that may be slowly introduced to a patient over time, or that they may get all at once. A good rule of thumb for this is: Abdominal drains, Colostomy, Ileostomy, Duodenostomy, Esophagostomy, and Chest tubes.
The medical rule of thumb is that any 5 of the above is usually fatal, even with extensive medical care.
However, they are chronic procedures that have to be combined with that patients acute medical crises, like cardiac and arterial problems and stroke, persistent or extensive and possibly drug resistant infection, cancers, mental deficiency, fractures and autoimmune diseases, etc.
Now, in the US, doctors can do all sorts of things, both in the long term, and in an acute medical crisis. But in most of the world, such drama would usually result in a natural death.
And this is where Mexico comes in. While they will provide a good quality of care, it is likely that they just wouldn’t be able to do many of the procedures that a person could get with the intense medical care of the US.
This is not euthanasia. It is just a level of acceptance of death lower than the “rule of 5” above. Perhaps for them, if a person needs 3 of that list, then they are probably going to die.
Something like a food and water tube, a respirator, and other such things are just as common in Mexico as they are in the US. And unlike US doctors, the Mexicans would be inclined to continue with food and water and air.
Euthanasia would be superfluous, because natural conditions would end the lives of critically ill patients before they would ever enter such a state as for euthanasia to become an issue.
If a patient needed complex and extensive surgery, with elaborate intensive care for many weeks, the Mexicans would probably shrug and say it is impractical, since they can neither provide a surgeon trained to that level, or long term intensive care of the type needed.
Of course, if such a treatment had a high likelihood of significantly extending or improving their life, it would be worth it to pay a return visit to the US.
This is not euthanasia, just acceptance. People are mortal.
Yes. And, that is precisely what I am seeking in my wishes and directions...that He be allowed to make that determination.
But he should leave state sanctioned MD assisted suicide off the public policy agenda because it is wrong, wrong, and wrong. The helpless elderly will be killed and make no mistake about it, it will happen. Greed motivates evil, including among family members and Hillary healthcare providers to "save costs." This would create atmosphere of despicable state sanctioned murder of innocents.
... I heard he sang a good song,
I heard he had a style,
And so I came to see him and listen for a while....
When my father reached the end at 92, we chose home hospice support and a low-tech, high-touch dying season. The amount of nutrition a dying person can absorb becomes trivial: at the end, my father was taking only about 300 - 500 calories a day of melted ice cream which I squirted into his mouth with a 10 cc syringe. He knew that it meant "I love you," and--- though he couldn't speak at that point --- I knew that he knew it.
THIS IS NOT EUTHANASIA. This is natural dying, with the family, with TLC. It was alternating between "Our Father" and Fudge Royale --- for us, a precious time.
However, that's not what this legislation is about. It's about lethal drug overdoses prescribed by death-docs who aren't even qualified to diagnose depression. And the only "protection" in this law --- if it mirrors Oregon's law --- is for the prescribing doctor, not the patient. The law protects the doctor from lawsuit, even if there's evidence of coercion on the part of a death-promoting heir (giving grim new significance to the saying "Where there's a will, there's a way.")
The drug-pushing doctor cannot be sued if he claims he acted in "good faith," a claim it is practically impossible to disprove in court, unless he actually took a bribe in front of a witness.
I keep getting pulled into other arguments. My big point was that nursing home and hospice care have a future in Mexico, where conditions are such that patients can get a lot more personal care, without them and their family being financially ruined, and yet, euthanasia isn’t really an issue, because the technology isn’t there to “destroy the body to save it.”
In the US, there are lots of doctors who would be willing to keep a disembodied brain alive in a jar, if they could. They are that disconnected from humanity.
Mexicans would never dream of cutting off a living person’s water or food or oxygen. That would clearly be murder to them. But at the same time, if a 90 year old man can only live another week if he gets a heart/lung transplant, they will quite reasonably suggest that it would not be worth it to anyone to do so.
That is not euthanasia, it is just common sense acceptance.
The choice being offered to people in the US is being murdered or becoming an undying experiment for Dr. Frankenstein. That is unreasonable. There is a season to live and a season to die. They still remember that down in Mexico.
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