Posted on 08/28/2011 11:12:55 AM PDT by wagglebee
Intent makes the difference there, IMO. If you give an intentional overdose with the intent to kill, that’s not the same as the sad necessity of a large enough dose to control pain hastening or even causing the end.
They gave her a dose to ease the pain, which may or may not have caused her death, but did relieve the pain. Not murder, nor suicide.
This is the kind of case where I have to say it's just plain mercy. Better to calm the pain, even at the risk of death happening sooner. It's quite different than guilting someone into death.
This is the kind of case where I have to say it's just plain mercy. Better to calm the pain, even at the risk of death happening sooner. It's quite different than guilting someone into death.
Yes, of course.
But you will die, and so will I, and so will everyone else who reads these words. We all will ALWAYS die, as a result of mortal processes or by accident.
So, when mortal processes are in train AND persons fail to eat and drink, they die. This is what is called natural death.
A person very close to my heart has severe dementia. This person also has some undiagnosed physical illness which is causing pain and wasting.
This person has nearly ceased to eat.
There are several ways to look at this.
In the particular case, the person is not a client of the health care system. This person is offered lovingly prepared, nutritious food three or four times a day but does not consume enough to sustain life.
If not artificially fed, death will come sooner than if artificially fed, but, even with artificial feeding, death within the year is inevitable.
Since all involved are Christians, this inevitable death is not fearsome, but rather marks a passage to a place where suffering ceases and we see face to face, rather than through a glass darkly.
Situations of this nature are occurring literally thousands of times a day. The Church does not regard artificial feeding in these circumstances as morally obligatory.
Do you?
Who SAID, they are not stirring up those passions?
I know a woman, who was dying at home from cancer, and when she became very uncomfortable, and was breathing hard, her husband called the hospice that was caring for her a home, a couple of times a week, and a nurse came, and gave her a shot. A few hours later, she passed away.
With hospice’s reputation, I wonder if the nurse went against the man’s religion (unbeknown to him), and gave her more than she needed to quicken her death.
There are pro-life hospices, and I wonder if there is a website, or something, to check which hospices, or other organizations, are pro-life.
On the contrary. I assure you the Church does insist that it is morally obligatory to give water and food to those who otherwise would die without it. (Even if it means using simple things like an IV or a peg tube to do so.) And it is considered ordinary care, not extraordinary.
I'll post the relevant documents later, gotta run right now, but I just attended a conference at which Cardinal Burke addressed this very issue you described.
We need a list of pro-life hospices. Do you have one? (I'm in the middle of starting up a pro-life hospice right now.)
“Some people believe that no matter how much pain you might be in at the end of your life, you have to be made to suffer until you die so that their idea of their religion is not offended.”
I don’t know of a single person who feels that way.
My religion teaches you can give a person all the pain medication they need for the pain (even if they die), but not more than they need for the prupose of killing them.
Dr. Kopp, I don’t mean any disrespect, but do you deal with IVs and PEG tubes every day, or are you speaking of them in a more theoretical sense?
“(I’m in the middle of starting up a pro-life hospice right now.)”
That is GREAT!
Sorry, I don’t have a list, but read about a pro-life hospice a number of years ago, plus there is a small hospice, in my are, which our church supports, so I assume they are pro-life.
Should be in my AREA, not “in my are,.”
>>>Who SAID, they are not stirring up those passions?<<<
Yes, I thought about that right after pressing the “post” button. However, those of us aware of this sort of thing aren’t the majority, either. Most people, sadly and unfortunately, aren’t worked up about the 30 million or so aborted people we’ve lost in the past several decades. I know it. You know it. But most folks don’t. And that is the evil genius of the left in the United States. When Stalin disappeared” your neighbor, you noticed. Hitler’s attempted to hide the concentration camps and ovens from public view. Our leftists have gone one step better, making the killing an anteseptic procedure done in a small room away from sight, destroying the person even before they are born. Not to sound to science-fiction like, but I would imagine that the only way the left could improve on this kind of genocide would be going back in time and eliminating the parents before conception.
Maybe in the long run our awareness will bring about the triumph of good. We can hope. In the meantime, God help us.
I have seen in recent years even people who are religious, and who oppose euthanasia, opting to cut off the IVs hydrating a loved one when the end approaches.
I realize its tough when the end comes, and its complicated, but I still believe you have no right to cut off their water. If you do that you may as well put a pillow over their head and end it straight up.
Refusing a treatment is one thing. That is letting nature take its course, and there comes a time when thats the right answer. But dehydrating someone has one absolutely certain outcome, and that is death. But, while the article is talking about people doing it to themselves, I see people doing it to their loved ones. Granted, usually at the end of a long fight, but the intent is to bring a long fight to a close. Everyone looks the other way and pretends like nothing untoward has happened.
We have to be careful that we don't make statements that are too broad or doctrinaire in these debates. There are certain circumstances where stopping IV hydration is not only acceptable but also necessary.
I was talking to a friend tonight, a good priest, who called for advice about his dad. His dad has stage IV cancer and is in liver and kidney failure and was just admitted to hospice care. Giving IV fluids to a person in total kidney failure could kill them by overloading their system. They discontinued the IV this morning. He can't keep anything down, so even a peg tube would be pointless. This is a good faithful priest who will not let anything happen to his dad that goes against Church teaching, but we both agreed that in his dad's case, IV fluids and a peg tube are not necessary, and would be detrimental.
But again, cancer like this has become the exception. Less than a third of hospice and palliative care patients are cancer patients (its probably less than a quarter with the most recent statistics.)
The vast majority of hospice and palliative care patients are people who have had strokes or have a neurological disorder such as Parkinsons, or, most common, advanced Alzheimers/dementia and "failure to thrive," Many of these latter patients "fail to thrive," simply because they can't feed themselves. But that's sufficient to land them in hospice/palliative care as the next candidate for "7 day euthanasia."
A close friend, a well known pro-life researcher, is a hospitalist in Harrisburg. He's the one that coined the term "7 day euthanasia." He says that half of the patients with advanced dementia or bad strokes coming into his Catholic hospital are routinely dead in a week from dehydration, victims of "7 day euthanasia."
I don't claim to be dealing with IVs or peg tubes every day. I'm just a dumb foot doctor. (I did organize the recent conference with Cardinal Burke on end-of-life issues with the assistance of the St. Gianna Physicians Guild, and I'll be opening a non-profit Catholic home hospice service in my area in 2012, so I'm fairly well versed in these issues.)
But I did do peg tube insertions when I was a resident working with general surgery, and I've dealt with plenty of IVs, most recently when my mother-in-law was in hospice dying of cancer. We had to fight and threaten the hospice provider to get them to provide the IV, because its not in "their protocol." When my wife asked how often the staff dealt with IVs, the nurse replied, "We NEVER do IVs."
That tells you everything you need to know right there.
One abortion is too many. The “moral majority” may be shrinking by the day, hour, and what often times, feels like minutes...but to give up now, while there are STILL those of us with the resolve to fight evil, would be worse than defeat itself.
You are right about what’s happening. BUT, we don’t HAVE any more “in the long run(s)”. Tragically, we ARE at the brink of “lawlessness”. There doesn’t have to be a “majority” to attain a victory. Fighting for the sake of the “righteousness”, IS the duty of man....despite the destruction that evil does along the way. Put this way.....the dangers lurking at mankind’s door will unequivocally affect ALL, if we fail to right this ship.
Oh, my goodness, can’t they spoon feed her some liquified baby food?
As put by Chuck Colson:
“One of our major problems as Americans today is that we want only the joy, not the sorrow. Many of us mistakenly believe that life is life only when it is healthy and comfortable. But God knows better. To make us whole, He makes sure that we experience every season—not only the springtime of youth but also the austerity of winter. As C. S. Lewis remarked, this fullness of experience is so necessary to our souls that ‘perpetual springtime is not allowed’.”
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