Pew Poll "Right to Die" Terminology Misleading
The Pew Poll, which I reported on below, also finds huge majorities favoring the so-called "right to die." This is an ambiguous term, often used by assisted suicide advocates to identify their cause. But this section of the poll is not referring to euthanasia or assisted suicide. Rather, it measures the belief that people have the right to refuse or stop unwanted medical treatment. That is a completely different moral issue from killing as a response to the difficulties associated with illness or disability.
The poll finds an unsurprising 84-10 in support of permitting death to come from natural causes by withdrawing life-sustaining treatment or other measures. Count me among the majority. As a former hospice volunteer, whose father died while under hospice care, I understand completely the importance of having the right not to have a respirator, chemotherapy, surgery, or even antibiotics. In the old parlance, people should not be hooked up to machines against their will.
However, I believe that feeding tubes should be analyzed differently. I believe cutting off feeding tubes from people based on quality of life judgments or cognitive impairment alone is immoral.
But I am not the dictator. It seem clear that people want the right to be dehydrated by removal or withholding of tube-supplied nutrition and hydration if they become profoundly cognitively disabled. And indeed, that is the law in all fifty states.
That being noted, it does seem to me that given the fact that depriving people of water and nutrition can only have one outcome, and given the profound symbolism inherent in refusing to provide such basic care, the responsibility for refusing feeding tubes should be on the patient and should have to put in writing. Absent that, the strong presumption of the law should be to provide such sustenance in all medically appropriate cases. Otherwise, we risk resurrecting the notion of the life unworthy of life wherein people are taken out to put them out of our misery.
posted by Wesley J. Smith @ 3:46 PM
12 Comments
12 Comments:
Mr. Smith, I don't see the difference between cutting off respiration and cutting off water and nutrition.
I want the final decision as to how and when I die, if possible. That's why I think of Dr. Kervorkian as an angel. His little botttle of CO and a face mask with my hand on the trigger is the best of all worlds.
I don't want to try and accumulate enough sedatives or narcotics to overdose, I don't want to blow my brains all over the bedroom or try to hang myself in the gararge. I don't want to veer my car into the on-coming cement truck, but you seem to want me to die while lying in my own soiled bedclothes.
Do you honestly think Terry Schaivo would have written a living will that stated that she was to be kept artificially alive for 20 years, no matter the impact on everyone else? Who among us is that selfish?
I guess I'm asking why different degrees of patient control are desirable? Why shouldn't the patient's desire be the only controlling authority? Regards
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Your claim that withholding antibiotics, (especially a basic antibiotic like penicillin dervivatives) is ok but not inserting a feeding tube is unethical is extremely lacking in logic. Note we routinely give mass quantites of penicillian to animals and children, its side effects are at the level of that produced by many common foods, its origins is in fact bread mold, and its introduction far predates the technology of feeding tubes, I don't see how its use can be deemed that consequential. While insertion of a feeding tube requires significant surgary, a far more cosequential activity than administration of many antibiotics.
Sorry, Eddiep, Kavorkian killed depressed women who weren't dying, a delusional schizophrenic man, and an abused wife suffering merely from "fibromyalgia" (she even was encouraged by her loving psychiatrist/abuser husband)...
The dirty little secret is that the "easy death" actually means premature dying, and a culture where "useless" people are pressured to die, or if they are incompetent, killed by "angels of death"...
As for Schiavo: If she couldn't swallow food and water, she couldn't swallow saliva, and would have died of aspiration pneumonia...the estimated "life span" of such people is two years...her death was for the convenience of her husband...who, if her parents hadn't fought him in court, would have inherited all that malpractice money...
Yes I have had patients who refused feeding tubes...they are optional in terminally ill people, including those with Alzheimer's disease...but too often they are placed for the convenience of the nursing homes and family...
I wonder if the folks who favor keeping people alive at any cost also favor extending this right to people who can't pay for it. We do ration care by ability to pay and if you don't have health insurance, you can have your feeding tube withdrawn.
Is he in favor of that? If not, what about other health care rationed by ability to pay?
I wonder if the folks who favor keeping people alive at any cost also favor extending this right to people who can't pay for it. We do ration care by ability to pay and if you don't have health insurance, you can have your feeding tube withdrawn.
Is he in favor of that? If not, what about other health care rationed by ability to pay?
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