Are Pro-Life Healthcare Providers Becoming an Endangered Species?

e3mil.com ^ | 7/1/03 | Nancy Valko, RN

[nickcarraway]

ping

[nickcarraway]

ping

[WOSG]

The Oregon Nursing Association has issued guidelines for assisted suicide that prohibit nurses from making "unwarranted, judgmental comments or actions" to patients, families or other colleagues when patients decide to kill themselves with doctor-prescribed lethal overdoses.

Anyone who says this is about "choice" is a fool or a liar ... or both. The culture of death abides no tolerance for objectors!

[cpforlife.org]

Please let me know if you want on or off my Pro-Life Ping List.

[waRNmother.armyboots]

Wow. I had no idea. Nurses have always been able to decline assisting with procedures if they have ethical, moral or religious objections. Considering that a significant number of older nurses and physicians considered health care a "calling", I am very concerned about health care in our country.

[PLK]

A dedicated nurse who cared for elderly nuns in a Catholic facility for over a decade was told she could resign when she objected to the slow starvation and dehydration deaths of two of her beloved nuns.

I know I'll get flamed for this, but here goes: I am very pro-life and am also a nurse. I don't know what e3mil.com represents, but I do know that spin can come from the right as well as the left, and this sounds like spinning to me. I really can't imagine Catholic nuns being starved to death, there's obviously more to the story that is not being included. I would bet my house that they were probably dying of a terminal illness and were simply not being force-fed by a tube or given IV fluids while they died.

Actually, we now know that, opposite previous thought, being in a state of dehydration during death is actually a blessing; it dries up lung secretions so that breathing is not so labored, and it decreases the discomfort of getting off and on a bedpan or into a bathroom during the last hours of life when mobility is poor and also anxiety about incontinence is lessened.

At any rate, this article makes a claim I just can't swallow. I need a lot more information before I would believe this as it's written.

One last comment, I have never been placed into a situation I have felt uncomfortable with at work. I currently work at a Catholic hospital, but even before at other jobs, no one forced me to participate in cares I did not want to. My religious views have always been respected.

[RJCogburn]

being in a state of dehydration during death is actually a blessing

As you said, plus it usually means the person is ketotic which is thought to reduce the perception of pain and suffering.

[nickcarraway]

RN ping

[Desdemona]

I'm honestly not sure what to make of this, especially as the accusation against the Catholic hospitals here go. I've never heard that charge before. In fact, I knew a lot of girls who groused that they could not get a morning after pill at a Catholic hospital.

Yes, there are states pushing medical people into learning proceedures they find abhorrent - and losing good candidates as a result. It's a quandry. But there are many out there who are VERY pro-life and say that killing the unborn and infirmed is not why they went into medicine and among many doctors it's not condoned. The morphine overdoses, to my knowledge, are still an underground practice.

The laws involved are not good. This is going to be a big fight, I think.

[freeangel]

I've worked as an O.R. nurse at several hospitals in three states and have never been forced to participate in the murder of unborn babies.

[KCmark]

So why not just give them a heavy morphine drip and spare them those few days of 'less agony'? They're going to die. Two days in a hospital bed is not going to make any difference except to the hospital bill. I don't want to be thirst to death, I want to OD on my own terms.

Of course, I can't find anywhere in the Constitution where it says I have the right to this action, and Catholics say suicide is very bad, so I guess I should get 'talibaned' out of my right to die with dignity.

[RJCogburn]

I would not argue with your comments.

[jammer]

Without comment on your decision, I have to comment on your reference to the Constitution. The Constitution does not GIVE US rights, so you won't find any allowance for your actions. The Constitution DOES take away ALL rights from the Federal government to take away our rights, except when explicitly given an exception. That's theory. In practice, the Constitution has no meaning.

[Canticle_of_Deborah]

Things are turning a frightening direction.

[Canticle_of_Deborah]

I should add, healers cannot simultaneously be killers.

[KCmark]

That is the argument I hear too often. Laws are chains. The fewer the better.

[RJCogburn]

healers cannot simultaneously be killers.

Healers can, and should if they are able, relieve suffering.

[jammer]

Exactly. That's the point of my post.

[Canticle_of_Deborah]

Relieving suffering and killing are two different things. Physicians and nurses take oaths to do no harm. No person or law should require us to betray our consciences and callings.